Fateverse Side Stories
by Lex Munro
Summary: Deadpool/Avengers/Marvel. Side stories from my Fateverse. Pairings include Steve/Tony, Steve/Sharon, fem!Steve/Tony. Warnings per chapter, including AU, rule 63, language, brief violence, and character deaths.
1. Fidelis

in the year 2538, Dr. Jack Hammer helped two of his colleagues computerize his best friend's consciousness for Project Fidelis.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. rampant bad 616 references. hints of het. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).

**pairing:** implied Sandi/Taskmaster, and implied Sue/Reed.

**timeline:** Network Operations Year One (AD 2538).

**disclaimer:** characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) MerianMoriarty and her pal Sarah have a massive pet peeve when it comes to programming: lack of coding standards. it means that people can get away with writing jury-rigged junk that nobody else can understand, fix, or improve. 2) Fury's PA is probably Pepper Potts. 3) when i say a 'small section' of the Core's surface, i'm talking about probably a three foot circular section. 4) Weasel raising a kid is a hilarious mental image. i'm thinking that the Masters family has a badass little tomboy daughter and a studious little bookworm son. when Weas says that one of the kids is 'almost normal,' he probably means the nerdy little boy.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Fidelis<strong>

Jack was feeling particularly harassed. The moment their first round-trip lateral slide had completed, he'd gone from being a back-burner Federation network programmer to being one of three people on the planet qualified to be called "hyperbolic chronometrists." Instead of happily ignoring him as long as various bits of the Internet did what they were supposed to do, the bastards were suddenly heaping up a huge frigging to-do list, a bunch of crap that Forge and Richards were ignoring, because they were flaky self-obsessed "let's build it first and _then_ find out what it does" maniacs.

So Jack bitched and griped to himself (because everyone else was too busy to listen) and sat down to work his way through the list. Forge did technology, and Richards loved chemistry and physics…but Jack, while his first love would always be computers, was a greedy learner. He'd study anything and everything. He collected degrees like twentieth century Terrans used to collect stamps and coins. No other individual knew and understood as much about the Core as he did.

Besides, Forge and Richards could build computers, but they wrote messy, absent-minded, un-maintainable code. So if they wanted any of the Fidelis support software to be understood by normal people (for the sake of fixing things that broke), they needed Jack to do the programming.

He was deeply involved in calculating a way to increase memory storage when he realized someone was calling his name.

"Doctor Hammer. Doctor Hammer. Doctor Hammer?"

"I'm working!" he shouted, standing up and glaring at the woman.

She had that blank, benign expression of someone who'd been a personal assistant all her life. "Admiral Fury would like—"

"I said I'm working. Can you see me working? The pens and paper and datapads?"

"Yes, Doctor Hammer, but—"

"Then why are you bothering me? Why don't you go pester one of the others with whatever new pitfall Fury's found? They love that shit. Me, I'm the one who turns 'and can it please have a Slurpee machine in it' into two separate nozzles for cherry and coke."

Her expression didn't waver. "Admiral Fury has asked for you specifically, Doctor Hammer. It concerns Project Fidelis."

"Of course it does, it all does!" he yelled, and threw a discarded ball of paper at her.

She dodged with a gentle tip of her head. "Specifically, it concerns the Core Processor. Doctor Richards gave it access to several systems deemed safe, and it has…made complications."

Jack swore inventively. He really hated top-classified projects like this, because it meant that there was no way to tell someone whether a problem that arose was a little problem or a big problem. 'Made complications' could mean that he (_it_, he was an _it_ now) had decided to play every episode of Golden Girls on repeat on every screen in the compound, or it could mean that it had blown something up.

And ever since the Core's conversion to a photoresonant computer, Jack was the one tasked with dealing with the mercurial personality still attached to its consciousness.

"Fine," Jack growled. "Let's go."

He followed the assistant down the hall and through three sets of heavily-guarded blast doors to the Core. The small visible section of its surface glittered with colored lights.

Fury was scowling, and Sue Richards was holding a little red-haired toddler on her hip. "Talk to him about this," Fury said, pointing at the kid. "Find some way that this makes sense, before I draw up an order to have his personality purged."

Confused, but finally faced with something more concrete than 'made complications,' Jack scampered over to the Core and touched it. "Wade, man, _what the hell_?" he hissed.

_~Hm? Oh, hi, Weas. What the hell what?~_

"That!" Jack said, waving at Sue and the toddler.

_~That's a little girl, Weas. You've seen 'em before, right?~_

"Well, where did she come from? Did you kidnap her from someplace using an unauthorized slide?"

_~Nah. They gave me access to the genetic fabrication facilities.~_

Jack sighed thickly. "You _made_ her? Why?"

Wade didn't have feet to shuffle anymore, but Jack got a definite feeling of Wade-is-shuffling-his-feet-like-a-little-kid. _~I always wanted a daughter?~_

"What? _Why_? Kids are—are noisy, and they _smell_, and they make messes—"

_~Pfft, so do computer nerds, Weasel.~_

Jack scowled. "Wade, you can't keep doing random shit like this, Fury's threatening to erase you again."

_~He erased me before?~_

"No—I mean, he's threatening, again, to erase you."

_~Did you explain again about how it takes the structure of a human consciousness—a pretty _special_ human consciousness—to run this thing?~_

"Richards must've said it a million times by now, and it was pretty frigging obvious before we converted you, but Forge seems to think the Core would still work without you. I think he's an idiot—you're the only one who's ever understood the timeline interactions, the only one who knows what the projective data means. The Core would work, but it'd all just be _data_, instead of _information_."

_~Wow. Really? Huh. So…Fury's seriously proposing cold-blooded murder? Because I can't exactly fight back anymore.~_

Jack sighed again. "Just…explain to me, in normal-people-terms, why you decided to make a little girl."

There was a long pause while reddish lights began to accumulate along the surface of the Core. _~I, uh…I dunno. I just…felt like she was supposed to be here. Like we'll need her for something later.~_

"Fury's not gonna like that answer."

_~Well, that's fucking _tough shit_, okay?~_ Wade snapped, sharply enough that everyone in the room turned. Self-consciously, he was quieter when he spoke again. _~That's the only answer I've got. I don't know why we need her, same way I don't know how I knew my brain would be perfect for this, same way I don't know how I knew what buttons to press to program the second lateral timeslide. Okay?~_

Jack frowned. "Well, I'm gonna make a backup of you, just in case. I'll keep it on my system. It might serve that patch-eyed jerk right if we pulled you onto a different server and left the Core blank, just to show him that the stupid thing won't work without you."

_~Awesome possum. Hey, I just finished drafting a blueprint and materials list for a better memory storage system—can I email it to you and have you take a look? Because…y'know…again, I have no idea how I know what I'm doing, and this is something you're good at.~_

Well. That was a pleasant surprise. "Really?" he said. "Uh…can I send you back a list of other stuff to tinker around with, since your brain works faster than mine now?"

_~Sure! There's only so much entertainment to be had once you've read the entire contents of the Internet. Thailand has some really messed-up porn, man. But I found a site that has every episode of Numbers, so that's cool.~_

"Great," Jack said, nodding absently. "So. Um. What the hell are we going to do about the kid?"

_~Her name is Hope, and she's very important for I-don't-know-what. So what you're going to do is take good care of her.~_

Jack waved his hands franticly. "No. Nononono. I suck with kids, you know that, Wade. Every kid I meet tries to beat me up. How about Sandi and Tony? They've got kids, and one of them's even almost normal."

_~Get a girlfriend. Or a babysitter. Hope needs to know how to program things. Before you ask, I dunno why.~_

"Aw, _man_…" Jack muttered. Reluctantly, he dragged himself over to Fury and Sue.

"Well?" said Fury.

"She, uh…she's important," Jack said miserably. "For something. I'm supposed to take care of her. Her name's Hope."

"Let me know if you need any help," Sue said with a poorly-concealed smirk, and passed the toddler to him.

"Bah," Hope said, as most babies seemed to do when they met Jack.

"Hi," he replied.

She kicked his glasses askew and laughed.

**.End.**


	2. Reloc

one of the original Auditor's last jobs.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. rampant bad 616 references. reference to multiple AU character deaths. hints of het and slash. language: pg (primetime tv).

**pairing:** implied Steph/Tony and implied Nate/Wade.

**timeline:** Network Operations 3651 (AD 6188).

**disclaimer:** characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) Wade's totally singing "The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades," by Timbuk3. 2) ah, who doesn't love that nifty technological hum made by Star Trek replicators? i know i do. 3) "Traveling without moving" is a reference to Dune. folding space (the primary means of long distance inter-stellar travel in the Dune universe) is fundamentally similar to opening a gravitic conduit.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Reloc<strong>

Wade sits alone in a darkened office, feet up on somebody else's desk, bobbing his head to the beat of the song playing on the radio.

"I study nuclear science, I love my classes…" he sings enthusiastically (but not so enthusiastically that he doesn't notice the sound of footsteps in the hall, or the steady blink of a red dot moving through the depths of the Node next to his feet. "I got a crazy teacher who wears dark glasses…things are goiiin' greeeeeat, and they're only gettin' better."

The door slams open, and the man standing there has a gun aimed at Wade.

"What, you don't like this song?" Wade asks innocently.

"Who are you?" the man demands. "What are you doing in my office? How did you get in here?"

Wade picks up Kali and holds her out. "Could you step a little closer and breathe toward the crystal ball? Need a quick retinal and DNA verification to go with the voiceprint."

"W-what?" the man says. The gun in his hand is shaking—nervous. Poor feeb probably hasn't ever had to use it on somebody who wasn't cowering for dear life.

Kali beeps. _~Ident confirmed.~_

Text starts to scroll through the Node, and Wade reads it off with practiced speed.

"Bolivar Trask TS331-Alpha, your phasic dissonance exceeds the acceptable margin of thirty-five percent. This charge and your culpability are not in question. You are required by law to submit yourself for lifelong incarceration in the Null-Resonance Detention Facility."

"Lifelong incarceration?" the man cries. "What law?"

"If you resist in any way, you will b—"

Trask shoots him. The bullet hits Wade high in the chest.

Wade looks down at the hole and the mess, and sighs. "See, now I have to kill you." In one smooth motion, he draws the magnum from his GCP and shoots Trask between the eyes. "Dammit, I loved this shirt. Who's next on the list, Kali?"

_~Reloc 99712: Stephanie Stark GF904 to replace Stephanie Stark-Rogers YS209. Bundle Keeper has been alerted to your operation.~_

He slips the magnum back into the GCP, feels it come apart under his hand with a satisfying little Star Trek hum. "GF is an oblique neighbor to YS?"

_~That is correct. There have been five corresponding locus events within the past decade of each bundle.~_

"Cool beans," he says. "And GF has made contact, but YS hasn't?"

_~That is correct.~_

Pursing his lips, Wade hops up from Trask's chair and grabs Kali from the desk. "Have the DBA pull me a summary of the last six months of each."

More text begins to scroll. Aftermath of the Civil War event, the DBA is careful to point out. New alliances, new political regimes, new legislation. An assassination attempt—at a fragmentation locus. Good; it should be easy to convince the subject to relocate, and she shouldn't have to adjust much.

"Lock on the fragmentation locus and prepare a gentle memory wipe to that point. It'll be easier on her if she can pretend it was a bad dream."

_~Memory wipe ready.~_

"Awesome. Open the tunnel."

With a twinkle, the gravitic conduit has formed, and a tiny calculation from Kali moves it to engulf him, transposing two points of the timestream.

"Traveling," he says in an overly dramatic voice, "without _moving_." He grins at the depressing penthouse apartment that replaced Trask's office. "God, I love my work."

All things considered, the place looks good. Most Captain Americas (Captains America, whatev) flip their lids when their spouses get assassinated. It's always worse when it goes the other way around (maybe Tony Stark is just an inherently unstable person), but there's still wreckage, and tantrums, and sometimes war.

He finds her sitting listlessly by a window. Her pale hair is in tangled disarray, as though she's been pulling at it. Her eyes are puffy and her nose is pink, but she's still pretty, in a plain and wholesome sort of way.

"Really, Pepper," she sighs hoarsely. "I'm fine, I promise. I just…I need time, that's all."

"What if I told you that you _don't_?" Wade asks.

She whirls, drops into a fighting stance with fists raised and ready, powerful muscle picking out corded shapes in her bare forearms. "Who are you? How did you get in here?"

He holds up Kali. "They call me the Auditor."

The fight drops right out of her. She sits back down, drained of all energy. "Oh," she murmurs. "Then I guess he really was meant to die. I…I'm ready. I won't fight you."

Wade walks slowly closer. "Stephanie Stark GF904," he says gently. "Your immediate relocation is required to replace Stephanie Stark-Rogers YS209."

Her head jerks up, pale eyes wide and surprised. "I…what?"

"Think of it like this… Somebody wanted your little revolution to come to a screeching-ass halt that day. And there were four basic outcomes possible. One: you both die, the country plunges into autocratic chaos. Two: only your husband dies, and (with a few minor variations) you go to pieces and the revolution fails anyway. Three: only you die, and he ends up as the country's dictator. Four: you both live, the revolution is a success, and the Meta-Human Democratic State is established."

She stares at him for a long time, absorbing the information. "And…so you're, what, consolidating?"

"Unfortunately, your bundle isn't salvageable. If this hadn't happened, we'd have passed it along to the Demolition Squad." Wade gives an apologetic shrug. "But the YS bundle is part of the central structure. It was pretty much a minor disaster when we saw that your counterpart had so nobly sacrificed herself."

Stephanie takes a long breath, puts her knees together, and nods as if she's decided something. "All right. How will this work?"

"The bundles are a lot alike, and we'll have a good cover story for you," he tells her. "The plan is to give you a gentle memory wipe, too, so that this will seem like a bad dream. Don't try to fight it; if you just go with it, it'll clear itself out and the bundle will absorb you."

"Tony w—" She breaks off and has to close her eyes for a few seconds. "Won't he know the difference?"

"In all the ways that count, you're a perfect copy of her. It's just that when the time came, she happened to see the assassin before he could. There shouldn't be any trouble at all, because their bundle needs your chronometric signature for stability."

She shakes her head. "So you mean to tell me that if you met a version of your wife—"

"Husband," he cheerfully corrects.

She has the good grace not to pause for long. "If you met a version of your husband who was chronometrically similar enough, you wouldn't know the difference?"

He crouches before her and puts a hand over hers. "If he died taking a bullet for me and I could suddenly have him back, I wouldn't _want_ to know the difference. That's human nature. I mean it—one little memory wipe and a little story that you were stunned or sleeping or magically transported somewhere, and Captain America is welcomed back with open arms, just in time to bolster the spirit of revolution before it can turn into one of vengeful conquering. _Don't overthink it_."

"Do you often have to convince people like me?" she asks him sadly. "Tell us it's for the best, but we just can't help dragging our feet the whole way?"

"It's better than the alternative, honey. If we don't get a replacement for his wife, I'll have to kill him. You really wanna waste a perfectly good Tony Stark?" He winks. "He's got such a nice ass, too…"

That earns him a soft laugh. "Okay," she says. "I'm ready. Let's go."

"You may lose consciousness," he warns as he holds Kali up again. "Remember: don't fight it. Kali, begin memory wipe."

_~Memory wipe in progress.~_

Her eyes glaze and drift shut.

Wade catches her when she tips forward. "Open the tunnel."

Again, the barely-there shimmer of the gravitic conduit forming and shifting.

Then pale daylight on a beach.

He drops Stephanie in the breakwater and drags her back to the tide line. There's a pay phone nearby, and he dials 911. When the operator calmly picks up and asks for the nature of the emergency, he grins. "Captain America lives," he says, and drops the receiver to dangle by its cord.

Then he walks back to stand over Stephanie for a moment.

"Next on the list?"

_~Approximately three days of mandatory psychological health leave.~_

"Sweet. Let's go home, I got me a hubby who needs kissin'."

**.End.**


	3. Read Error

meanwhile, at the Network Core, Data Analyst 109 asks the right questions, and the Database Administrator replies with troubling data.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. a little Rule 63 for flavor. rampant bad 616 references. hints of het. hints of femslash. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).

**pairing:** passing Nat/Wade, reference to Nate/Wade, implied Nat/Dom, hints of Clint/Bobbi, Luke/Jessica, and Steph/Tony.

**timeline:** just after Logan and Wade leave the database in **The (Wo)Man Behind the Curtain** (**Blood & Tears**).

**disclaimer:** i doesn't owns the movies or the characters. or the assorted objects of pop culture reference.

**notes:** 1) i thought i was pretty unsubtle, but if you're confused about Stephanie...Data Analyst 043 (Stephanie Rogers) is a female AU counterpart of Steve. the details of her job and her 'scandalous demotion' show up in **Sysadmin**. 2) in case you couldn't figure it out for yourself, Data Analyst 109 (Natalie Summers) is a female AU counterpart of Nate. she's a lot younger and a little more laid-back (not growing up in the middle of an ongoing war will do that). 3) as far as the simulator station goes, picture a nice computer chair in a small, dark room with a desk-like console coming out of the wall. to interact with the computer system, you put on some nifty glasses that have bluetooth built in and stick your hands out over the desk. the funky glasses let you see and hear the computer interface. if that doesn't work for you, picture Tony Stark's awesome 3d work station in miniature.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Read Error<strong>

Analyst 109 enjoys her work. She finds it deeply fulfilling.

Her job is to monitor a segment of the timestream for any stability issues. If she spots one, she files the appropriate report, the Core tracks the causes and effects, and she is either finished with the issue or charged with resolving it (at which point she files more reports and makes some calls to coordinate the efforts of Network Agents or, in extreme cases, Keepers).

From what she understands, her enjoyment of such busybody, hands-on world saving is a common thread among her counterparts in the multiverse. Stephanie (Analyst 043) tells her that it is a trait much better suited to a woman, apparently, since the vast majority of those counterparts are male and extremely high-entropy.

She respects Stephanie's opinion, because Stephanie monitors some of the most crucial primary bundles—Stephanie is one of the best and most diligent Analysts the Network has, in spite of a scandalous demotion a few years back (and most of Stephanie's counterparts, even the men, are high-resonance).

For her part, Analyst 109 only has one primary bundle under her care at the moment, and most of its stability issues were taken care of by the Auditor ages ago. She misses working with him; he was funny, and he was sweet in a slightly twisted way, but she has made a personal rule against inter-timeline romance. Just as well, since he ended up marrying her counterpart from his timeline.

Today, she stares at the monitoring simulation as it spins slowly. Filaments of light swirl and eddy in darkness, their edges constantly melding and splitting and coiling together. Parts grow and shrink and tangle like the tendrils of some enormous jellyfish.

She watches the tiny branches flicker and twist and flow back into the larger ones; one or two occasionally whip out to a different bundle before whipping back or melting away. All of this is 'normal.' All of this is a symptom of semi-infinite possibilities sliding apart and merging together as different paths lead to the same ends because of common denominators and sympathetic resonance. On such a small scale, none of it is cause for worry.

Once or twice, she thinks she sees a ripple, but she dismisses it as eyestrain—after all, it is nearing the end of her last shift of the week, and she often forgets to blink the recommended number of times.

Again, she thinks she spots a ripple.

Everything seems to be in order, but she goes ahead and flags the rippled branches for tracing (it is a simple enough matter to pinch each thin stream of light with one hand while she motions through the trace request form with the other).

_~Branch trace approved, Analyst 109.~_

The simulation expands in places, following each flagged branch through the adjacent monitoring segment and scrolling to show the expansion.

"Mark known agents," she says.

Three tiny threads light up, two green and one blue. The green ones are just high-resonance subjects. The blue is a Keeper.

She reaches a hand out and motions to expand the agent information.

Keeper 113. Node 082.

"Ident."

The simulation flashes red.

She frowns, closing and opening her hand to collapse and expand the agent information again. "Ident," she repeats.

Another red flash.

"Oh, for goodness' sake…" She flags the entry as corrupted data (a motion like crumpling a used tissue) and files a dataread request.

_~Dataread from Core Tower approved, Analyst 109.~_

With a sweep of white light, the simulation rescans. She expands the agent information on the Keeper again.

"Ident."

A third red flash.

She growls with frustration and gives the simulated file a futile shake.

"Jeez, what's got your panties in a twist?"

She does not bother to ask why Clint (Analyst 315) is incapable of waiting for her shift to end before showing up to pester her about social gatherings. This time when she flags the entry as corrupted, she goes to the trouble of filing a request for the entry from the Database itself.

_~Dataread from Central Database approved, Analyst 109.~_

"So Bobbi 'n Jan 'n the girls were wondering if you'd be good for some drinks later. I mean, now that Dom's out of that funk she was in, we could totally hook you up. She said she's back in the dating game, after all, and—hello? _Hellooooo_? Network Core to Natalie Summers-Dayspring-Etcetera, you there?"

"Not now, Clint. Ident."

The entire sim goes red, but a dataread given by the DBA is always thorough and accurate. So when the read-error finishes processing, its source is drawn up in plain view.

_~Keeper 113, subject designate Wade Wilson XS303-Omega. Subject does not exist at Point of Operation.~_

"Trace Node."

The blue thread redirects far out of her simulation scope.

_~Node 082, Archimedes, non-sentient. Unlocked, active. Queries pending.~_

"Show pending queries."

_~Query: Location nearest unlocked Node. Query: Location nearest high-clearance agent. Query: Location nearest lateral-capable Keeper. Query: Clarify Auditor.~_

She feels the breath rush out of her. Only an unauthorized user would ask those kinds of questions. "Shit," she says. "_Shit_."

"What's up, Nat?"

"In the name of all things holy, Clint, will you _go bother Steph and Tony_?"

She barely even remembers how to file a report for a stolen Node, and she has never had to file a report for a missing Keeper.

With anxious speed, she scrolls through the list of forms (the motion is something quite like winding yarn with both hands).

"How is it even possible to miss something like this?" she wonders aloud, and finally gives up on the proper reports in favor of punching up a security breach report instead. "Who the hell was supposed to be watching One-Thirteen?"

"The Keeper?" Clint asks. "Or the Node?"

"Keeper."

"Oh, he's one of Luke's. But you know how he hates Wades, so I honestly wouldn't be that surprised if the poor dumbass got run over by a train without a single flag raised."

Angry and disgusted, Natalie files a full misconduct report in record time.

An alarm goes off overhead; she logs out and pulls the simulation visor away from her face.

"Um, has this ever happened before?" Clint asks, staring up at the ceiling.

_~Attention Network Analysts: the following Nodes have unexpectedly ceased information upload. Node 003 Lachesis, Node 007 Prophet, Node 019 Hyperion, Node 020 Helios, Node 033 Pacifica, Node 053 Genesis, Node 054 Nihilus, Node 077 Oracle, Node 082 Archimedes, Node 105 Cleo, Node 142 Anubis, Node 143 Amaterasu, Node 157 Djinn, Node 189 Pele, Node 199 Titan, Node 201 Janus.~_

"That's a lotta Nodes," Clint says unnecessarily.

"Sixteen," Natalie agrees.

_~Additionally, Node 098 Ragnarok will be in receive-only mode until further notice. Additionally, the hyperbolic chronometric wavelength of Keeper 075 has phase-leveled; Wade Wilson BT562 has been appointed Keeper 188 to replace Keeper 075 as custodian of Node 119 Forecaster. Additionally, the hyperbolic chronometric wavelength of Keeper 176 has phase-leveled; Steve Rogers HG552 has been appointed Keeper 189 to replace Keeper 176 as custodian of Node 061 Freyr. That is all.~_

Swift footsteps echo in the corridor. Emma and Carol open the door.

"You hear that, Nat?"

Clint points. "Hear it? I think she _found_ it."

Natalie sighs. "I saw a weird ripple, so I traced down to Keeper One-Thirteen and got a read error. Turns out he's been erased, and somebody else has been using his Node to send queries. If Luke would just get over this thing he has against Wades, he would've seen it ages ago. I mean, _sixteen Nodes_? Clearly someone's out there stealing them."

"Jessica is going to yell herself hoarse," snickers Emma.

"But that's good, right?" says Carol. "The more he surrounds himself with Nodes, the more his own resonance phase solidifies…then all we have to do is send an Agent to re-tune him and _bam_, it carries all the way across and every iteration of him flatlines out of the timestream."

"Whoever this is, he has obviously re-tuned several Keepers," Emma argues. "Do we _have_ anyone capable of taking down someone like that?"

Clint shrugs. "Maybe the Auditor? Or one of the Hope designations? I mean…they were basically designed as resonant stabilizers."

The door hisses open again.

Stephanie stands there with that determined look that she gets. "You can all stop conjecturing. Forecaster finally pinned down The Traveler and has made him capable of timesliding. We've got them working on the problem."

"Who the hell is The Traveler?" Carol asks, unimpressed.

Natalie shakes her head in shock. "Um. The primary resonant locus in my segment. Wade Wilson BT562, one of the new Keepers. I don't remember the full brief, but he's been uncontrollably brainsliding for a while now—totaling up to something like four hundred and thirty years of miscellaneous life experience. He's got more than enough cobbled-together firsthand knowledge to be a re-tuner."

Stephanie nods. "And of all Wade Wilson designations, he's the second-hardest to kill."

They stand in stunned silence for a moment.

"Holy shit," Clint finally says.

"Language, young man," Stephanie chides.

"Holy _stuff_. Wades are hard to kill, that's half the _point_. This one's _especially_ hard to kill? That's downright scary."

"It may be scary, but it's going to erase this Node-hunter and get us back our missing Nodes."

Natalie shakes her head again. "Steph, I don't know about this… We're just dropping the fate of the multiverse on this guy? We're not even sending him any backup? Do we at least have a Plan B?"

"Plan B involves displacing a Hope. Sysadmin doesn't want to do that if it can be avoided, because all the most powerful designations are busy. If we extract the wrong one, her home branch could completely destabilize, so Plan B requires getting Oh-Five-Six in to examine the data and do a trace."

The alarm goes off again.

"Second time in one day, and I've never even _heard_ that thing before," Clint mutters.

_~Security breach reported at Network Branch Complex in bundle 33701-505. The hyperbolic chronometric wavelength of Keeper 077 has phase-leveled; Hope Summers AR553 has been appointed Keeper 190 to replace Keeper 077 as custodian of Node 218 Kali.~_

Natalie feels a sudden chill, and her hands start to shake. The words echo in her mind: _Keeper 077 has phase-leveled_.

The Auditor is dead.

"The Auditor was re-tuned?" whispers Carol.

"We are so completely fu—"

"_Clint_!"

"Sorry, Steph. But we are. Is this still Plan A, or does having a Hope for the new Auditor make it Plan B?"

**.End.**


	4. Building Bridges

a little Cartographer, because i wanted to fiddle with the idea of Network relations with Asgard.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse, BT-verse (alternate movieverse). sci-fi with technobabble. minor spoilers for the Thor movie. language: pg (for damn).

**pairing:** none/gen (though i will warn you that i'm a Thorki fan).

**timeline:** HAH. i don't need no steenking timeline. it's in the Blood & Tears universe (which is a slightly off-kilter Marvel Movieverse that manages to reconcile all the movies to-date), before Logan and Wade get back together, and before Tony and the Avengers are in New York, but after Thor's little adventure in New Mexico.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) Three (Programmer 003) is a Forge. kind of a party-animal!Forge. in his defense, he works his butt off for the Network, and Asgardians really know how to party. 2) the movie-verse Asgardians have adopted Three as their version of Tyr. the comic-verse version of Tyr is a little lame and far-off-the-mark of the mythological version... but Tyr is a warrior-philosopher kind of god, and is considered one of the bravest gods because only he had the courage to venture close enough to Fenrir to feed the captive beast. Tyr is missing his right hand because he placed his right hand in Fenrir's mouth as a show of good faith (Fenrir bit it off when it turned out the gods had just been trying to get close enough to chain him up), so my brain went straight to a bizarre Tyr-Forge analogy. 3) Frey (or Freyr) is a Norse god of weather, fertility, and success. he helped build much of Asgard. 4) the Vanir are gods of fertility and wisdom. 5) Heimdall (or Heimdallr) is the all-seeing, all-hearing sentry of Asgard. in this case, tall, dark, and long-suffering (Idris Elba was so fabulous in the movie...). 6) Nidavellir is the home of the dwarves, Svartalfheim is the home of the dark elves, and Alfheim is the home of the elves. 7) Dvergar are Norse dwarves. 8) "Bifrost-based point-to-point non-lateral flatscale timesliding" ... it's just moving from one exact location to another through space but not time by use of the Bifrost bridge. i'll make MerianMoriarty explain it.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Building Bridges<strong>

It's often best, Steven has learned, to go with the flow. His resonant signature is heavy enough to have a mind-altering effect on most people he meets, whether he likes it or not, so there's a tendency for people to fawn and exclaim.

The first time he visited an Asgard, the natives tried very hard to make him stay. More than that, they'd tried to add him to their number, put him in their histories which were-and-weren't myths, and the corresponding Earths experienced some slightly confusing shifts in the names and numbers of their pantheons. After some lengthy discussions, it was decided (mostly without Steven's input) that this was a perfectly acceptable state of affairs.

"Just go with it," Programmer 001 had advised.

It became the mantra.

If some newly contacted timeline wanted to enthrone Steven, _just go with it_. If they wanted to make him some kind of celebrity, _just go with it_. If they wanted to declare a holiday for him, name their children after him, add a god to their religion, _just go with it_.

The Theorists all nodded very seriously at the advice. Some of them even showed Steven the calculations to prove that resisting the effect he had on timelines could actually damage them.

So here he is, ready to visit 52155-3939 for the first time because Programmer 003 said the calming effect of his signature might be useful.

He sighs while he watches Three check the contents of a small bag of tools.

"Whenever you're ready," Three says, still poking around in the depths of the bag.

"Magellan, lateral slide. Destination primary BT, approximately three years downstream of point-oh. Desired landing site, Asgard, Valhalla, entrance."

There's a beep of completed triangulation. Steven's other three Nodes are very good at finding times and places and matching them up to colloquial titles. He has no doubt they will arrive as close to the specified destination as safety allows.

"Initiate timeslide."

A brief rushing sensation, flashing light, and _there_.

"Are we going to have to do this for each bundle stemming from the MM locus?" he asks.

"Just the big ones," Three replies. "It'll propagate. We've been doing the calculations, that's why it's taken us this long to get around to it. That, and there wasn't any real rush for most of them. No irreparable harm just yet. As long as we eventually got around to hopping back a few years and fixing things, it'd all snap into place. That's what Six says, anyhow, and that kid spins my head with how much Theory he's got knocking around in that interdimensional switchboard he calls a brain. Besides, MM-derivative Asgards are very hospitable. They like me here. Might as well party it up, right?"

Steven finds that to be a very irresponsible attitude, and says so.

"Oh, come on, Steve… It's good to kick back and enjoy a friendly welcome now and then."

"I get a friendly welcome _everywhere_," Steven points out. "I never get used to it, and it never feels any less discomfiting. Dang it, I'm an _explorer_, not a _deity_."

The Programmer nods, but Steven knows it's from agreeability rather than agreement.

And then they straighten up as a patch-eyed old man in fine robes steps out of the huge hall before them.

Old. He's probably a few hundred years _younger_ than Steven, and _younger still_ than Three. Steven feels guilty about that for no particular reason.

"Tyr!" the man exclaims, arms spread wide in welcome. "We did not look to your coming for many years yet."

Three just waves a hand through the air. "You should know, Lord, to expect me when things break."

"Indeed." The old man claps Three enthusiastically on the shoulder.

Steven waits for Three to introduce them.

"Oh! My manners," Three says, waving an arm at Steven. "Lord Odin, this is my comrade, Steven. He is…an envoy, of sorts. An ambassador. Steven, Lord Odin is King of Asgard."

Steven knows this—it's not his first Asgard, thanks.

Odin clasps Steven's forearm firmly. "A comrade of our comrade is welcome here. Come! I will not have you work without first being supped."

This is how Steven is dragged into the awkward situation of attending his first Asgardian banquet.

There is laughter, and singing, and a great boom of storytelling from a large man who insists on speaking with his mouth full. The mirth and merrymaking are occasionally punctuated by a crash of broken crockery that Three assures Steven is a perfectly polite way of asking for a fresh beverage.

_Just go with it_, he tells himself a trifle desperately. It's really no stranger than a diplomatic banquet aboard a starship full of aliens.

Briefly, he looks around the boisterous chaos of the dining hall and can picture a certain race in particular.

Yes, Klingons would fit in very well here.

"Tell me of your adventures, young Thor!" Three presses, holding a hand up somewhere near chest-height. "Last time I was here, you were this high and clamoring for a sword that wasn't made of wood. And where has your brother got to?"

Steven can see a flash of sorrow on the young god's face and nudges Three with his elbow. "We need to get to work."

Three shows his opinion of that by downing the last of his drink and pitching the empty mug to the floor.

"You are a dour man, Sir Steven," Thor tells him with a lopsided grin. "Is your work so pressing that you cannot enjoy your food and drink?"

"His work," Steven corrects. He leans out of the way when a pretty girl brings Three's next drink. She smiles at him. He ignores her. "Three—er, _Tyr_—is meant to be examining your point-to-point non-lat—your _bridge_."

Thor's brows rise at that, and his eyes take on an eager light. "You are come to repair the Bifrost?" he asks Three.

Mouth full, Three just waves his mechanical right hand eloquently and nods.

"Eat faster, then! To your task, man!"

Three takes a swallow of wine and laughs. "Got a girl waiting somewhere? What does pretty little Sif think of that?"

Thor scoffs. "Sif likes Jane. She has a great respect for wisdom and the practice of science, as you well know."

"A scientist, eh?" says Three. "Jane. A very nice name. All right, we'll get to work, then—for the sake of Miss Jane."

A man named Frey leads them out onto the shattered bridge, where the gatekeeper gazes into the black void of space.

Three investigates the ragged end, running scans that Steven doesn't really understand. Steven has never understood much about the engineering aspects of the timestream. He knows enough to get by. He knows enough to tell Howard or Anthony that something is broken and _not_ try to fix it himself.

"Do you still have the blueprints?" Three asks.

"Somewhere," Frey confirms. "I was hoping you might bring a copy so that I don't have to go looking… There's always the possibility that I did something silly like using them for scrap paper while I was inventing something else. You know how I am."

Three nods and knocks his metal fist on the bridge (it makes a ringing crystalline noise). "Well, unless you think the Vanir can come up with about a thousand cubic feet of Bifrost crystal in their vaults, you'll need to fly out yourself and trade for some. Heimdall, have a look, will you? Maybe Nidavellir or Svartalfheim."

The gatekeeper sighs, like a man being asked to change the channel from his favorite TV show so that someone can check the score of a sports game. "Alfheim," he says after a moment. "The Alfar appear to have plentiful supply of Bifrost crystal, Lord Tyr."

"Oh, good!" Three exclaims, digging around in his bag of tools. "That'll save time. We've got a timetable to meet, after all." He pulls out a small data projector, which shows a segment of a TMS.

Frey leans close. "If that's us, there…we've got less than a year to repair the bridge! Why didn't you say so? Where's your sense of urgency, man? This isn't a problem that can be solved with time-travel, you know—there's no way to step out of time to repair _our_ Bifrost. This is a six-month job at the very least, even with Dvergar helping all the way. Odin save us all from daft Fidelis Engineers…"

"I am _not_ daft," snorts Three.

Steven has to bite his lip to keep from disagreeing.

Three zooms in on part of the TMS. "Okay, so…get the crystal from Alfheim…recruit workers from Nidavellir…" He pauses and looks up. "You know, it might be faster to go to Earth and point out ether resonance to them. They should have a good supply of vibranium—which, of course, can be crystallized into Bifrost. Steve, who did you say was in charge of this version of Earth?"

Steven has a good memory for details like that. Thank goodness. "Their version of SHIELD should be growing pretty well by now. Not exactly 'in charge,' but you know how Nick Fury gets."

Three scratches his head. "Well, we can't build it _for_ them. So they'd need a decent astrophysicist, a very smart engineer, and a very open-minded wave-theory physicist."

"From Thor's stories of Earth, his Jane is an astrophysicist," Frey says. "A scientist who studies the way stars move and interact, yes? She has been studying the bridge phenomenon and the paths between worlds."

"Perfect."

Steven looks out at the stars. "We're on a schedule. We need a working conduit between Earth and Asgard within the year. So let's work on it from both ends."

Three puts the projector away and grins. "You've got an idea."

"I know a 'very smart engineer' and a 'very open-minded wave-theory physicist.' To my experience, throwing them in a room together with an idea of what you want can net you anything from a death-ray to an inter-dimensional communicator."

"Tony and Reed?"

"Tony and Reed."

"That ought to be fun."

Steven should have known it wouldn't be.

Three stays behind to help Frey negotiate, so it's all up to Steven and his fairly subversive personal resonance.

He stands in a very official building full of black-suited agents and doesn't fidget with Magellan. Sure, the Asgardians made contact with the Network a couple thousand years ago, but these people, the ones on _Earth_, aren't technically ready for First Contact. The designation of a Keeper for their bundle is still years away from this point.

Magellan is a Dumb Node, and therefore can't answer anything interesting without Steven, but war-like cultures on the cusp of readiness can use brute force to puzzle out a lot of things they're not ready for.

So Magellan is a familiar weight in a pouch on Steven's belt, and he marches his way up to a certain desk outside a certain office and tries not to fall too much back into old military habits.

The woman behind the desk doesn't even glance at him.

"I need to speak with Director Fury," he tells her.

"Should have made an appointment," she replies crisply.

And that right there, that sentence—_should have made an appointment_—pretty much says it all, as far as incognito tuning goes.

He tries not to think about all the terribly uncivilized things he could do to get his way, all the things that the Wades would do. He tries not to think about how they probably would have shot someone by now, and how refreshing that might be in comparison to his typical ask-for-milk-and-get-a-cow approach.

"Okay," Steven says. "Let me rephrase that. Either you're going to let me into that office, or I'm going to be inside the office without permission. This is very, very important."

She stops typing and finally looks him up and down.

"Please, ma'am," Steven adds.

She blushes and fusses at her hair. "Fine, but that old sourpuss is not going to be happy, and don't say I didn't warn you." Her hand presses some button on her desk. "Urgent appointment, Director Fury," she says in a sweet, personable tone, and jerks her head toward the office.

This Nick Fury is dark-skinned and bald, but no less physically intimidating than any other. Nick Fury would be intimidating as a _cotton candy salesman_.

"Urgent…appointment…" the man says, bland and sharply enunciated. "I don't think I need to tell you just how urgent it had better be, or that you better start talking _fast_."

Steven falls into a parade rest out of old, dredged-up reflex. "Sir," he says, also out of reflex. "This planet requires a working long-distance intra-dimensional point-to-point conduit. A…space-bridge. And you need it to be finished within the year, preferably within the next five to eight months. Because you need to start negotiating an alliance with the denizens of Asgard."

To his credit, Fury does not start laughing and tell Steven to get lost. He waves a finger through the air. "And you know how to do that."

It isn't a question—which is good, because Steven couldn't answer it if it were. "I can tell you the three people that can make it happen and the raw material they'll need. I can leave them with some…very suggestive information."

Fury grins wryly and turns to look out his window. "But you _can't_ just give us a blueprint and let us go."

"Coming to you instead of going straight to the scientists is already stretching the boundaries of professional ethics, but I'm in a hurry."

"Scientists," says Fury. "Three scientists. Well, since you're talking about space-bridges and Asgard, one of those has got to be Jane Foster. The research we confiscated from her was what you'd call 'very suggestive information.' And if we're going to build something impossible straight out of a sci-fi novel, the other two have got to be Stark and Richards."

"Yes," Steven says.

Slowly, Fury turns away from the window again. "Now, why would I want to distract Stark when it takes so damn much time and effort to get him to concentrate in the first place?"

Steven withstands the one-eyed glare. It's really no worse than staring down most versions of Wolverine. "You have five to eight months," Steven reiterates. "Even if I handed them the blueprints, the materials, and a diligent workforce, it will take nearly that long to build. As for the stubbornness and brilliance of Stark men, Tony has always been easier to re-target than Howard. Wave a puzzle at him and he latches on like a leech."

Fury's glare turns into a stare. "I would ask your name, but I'm not sure you'd answer."

Steven shrugs. "I could answer, but it wouldn't make any sense to you."

"Try me."

"Steve Rogers LF228-Omega."

"Implying that there are a lot of other people with the name Steve Rogers out there. Makes sense. Steve is somewhere around the hundredth most popular first name in this country, and Rogers is around the fiftieth most popular last name."

Steven grins. "Yes. _But_. Do you really think I need a two-letter prefix, a three-digit number, and a Greek-letter suffix just for that?" He pulls Magellan out of its pouch. "Magellan, excluding myself, how many people in the current timeline are named Steve Rogers?"

_~457.~_

Fury looks at Magellan. "Two letters, three digits, and a Greek letter. That's over sixteen _million_ combinations. What do you need all that for?"

Steven raises Magellan. "When," he answers. "And where. And _elsewhere_. Can I trouble you for some paper?"

Blank-faced and credulous, Fury slides some letterhead across his desk.

"Magellan, print instructions for crystallizing vibranium into Bifrost. Then print rudimentary explanations of Bifrost-based point-to-point non-lateral flatscale timesliding and ether-resonance pathing. And then give them the path-relative coordinates to Asgard."

A brief flash of lights while Magellan retrieves the entries from the CDB, a beep when it's done. He holds it out over the paper and waits while it burns a page worth of information before he flips the sheet and waits again.

"There are eight other worlds out there that you can access by ether-resonance pathing," Steven tells Fury. "I'm giving you the coordinates to _one_ of them; I recommend you don't go poking around, because there are things on some of those worlds that could turn Earth into an ugly black rock if you make them angry."

Magellan beeps again when it finishes the print order. It's ten pages, front-and-back.

"Show it to Reed first," Steven suggests. "So he can ramble enthusiastically at Tony. It's always easier to shift his focus if another scientist is rambling enthusiastically."

Fury heaves a deep sigh and scowls at the ten pages of highly classified scientific information. "And it has to be Stark?" he says in the tone of one long-suffering.

Steven raises his eyebrows. "Only if you want it in the next decade or so. You and I both know—given sufficient motivation and a big enough pile of spare parts, that man can build _anything_, and years before anyone else even thinks it's plausible, let alone _possible_."

"The last thing that overgrown narcissistic toddler needs is to hear somebody say that aloud."

Steven doesn't agree, but he knows he's a minority. He shrugs. "If you'll excuse me, Director Fury, I have to get back to Asgard and make sure my colleague is working instead of drinking."

**.End.**


	5. Mistaken Identity

some more Cartographer, and some Tony, because he's hilarious.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. minor spoilers for the Thor movie. sci-fi with technobabble. language: pg (for hell).

**pairing:** a little Tony/Steve.

**timeline:** probably the second or third movieverse timeline Steven's had to drop in and fix. stupid broken Bifrost...

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) lol. RDJ!Tony is such a smartass. 2) ...and incorrigible.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Mistaken Identity<strong>

The Cartographer is a patient man by nature. This is, quite possibly, the only thing saving the man currently ignoring him.

Because there are few things more trying than being ignored by Tony Stark, and one of those is being ignored by him when you've told him that what you're saying is important and he claims he's paying attention.

"Tony, you're still not listening," Steven says over the sound of _very loud_ music.

"Of course I am, sweetheart," is the automatic reply.

"If you were listening, you'd realize you're not talking to your boyfriend."

"Steve, I think you're working too hard. Maybe cut back on the heroing hours, let Carol cover a shift. Run along, honeybear, Papa's got work to do."

Steven doesn't mind being talked down to (not as much as most people, certainly), and he likes AC/DC, even when it's being blasted at a rude volume, but there's really only so much a man can take. He doesn't break anything—he's very proud of that. He just digs out Magellan and tells it to hack the workshop mainframe and _turn that racket off_ so that there's one less distraction for Tony.

Tony fumbles the wrench in his hand and whips around to _finally_ do more than glance at Steven. "Steve, you know better than to turn off…my…"

Steven puts his hands on his hips and tries not to scowl.

Tony blinks at him. "You…aren't quite Steve."

"I explained all that," Steven grunts. "You _said_ you were paying attention."

"I mmmmay have ever-so-slightly re-specced the truth."

"You can't re-spec the truth, Tony."

"Sure I can, if you give me a five minutes and a decent computer."

Steven stops trying not to scowl.

"Yyyeah, not funny, got it. Um. See, this is the part where I sit here and put on my most adorable pout to show you how contrite I am and you go back and hit the footnotes of everything you said when I was supposed to be paying attention."

The pout _is_ adorable. Steven shakes his head. "Footnotes, right. Hi, I'm a different Steve from a different part of the multiverse. Part of my job is making sure the whole thing doesn't destabilize and go boom. To do that, I need you to build a Bifrost gate, a point-to-point transition conduit that uses a certain powerful crystal resonance to enable near-instantaneous travel along certain specific paths. Now—"

"Tony, _what_ is going on?"

Inconvenient complication after inconvenient complication.

Steven closes his eyes. In an ideal world, this would have been a five minute speech to Tony and a skip back to this bundle's Asgard to pick Three up again, just like the last bundle. Instead, he's been here eight minutes already.

Sighing, Steven turns and points to his counterpart. "You were not supposed to be back yet. I may have to erase your memory. For now, please be quiet so I can finish what I was saying."

"Erase my mem—like hell you will!"

"As one Steve to another, this is save-the-world stuff. _Please_, let me finish, so we can—"

His counterpart looks over his shoulder and scowls. "Tony!"

When Steven turns, Tony has on his most innocent expression.

Steven shakes his head again. "You were staring at my butt, weren't you?"

Tony blinks. "That depends on your definitions of 'staring' and 'at.'" He leans to one side to talk to his boyfriend. "In my defense, it's just about identical to yours. Call it a case of mistaken identity. It's actually pretty fascinating, from a technical standp—"

"Tony, stop talking."

Tony closes his mouth and resumes his 'adorable pout.'

"As I was saying, I'm going to leave you with instructions on how to make Bifrost out of vibranium, as well as the coordinates to Asgard. A young woman named Jane Foster will be here in a few days to talk to you about ether-resonance paths. Use the information I give you and what she knows to build a gate that will allow people to travel to and from Asgard. You have about eight months to get Thor here and convince him that the Avengers are the good guys, which may not be easy since he's not too thrilled with SHIELD right now. Got it?"

Tony nods.

Steven turns back to his counterpart.

"You're not erasing my memory without a fight, mister," the man says.

Steven frowns. "Yeah, I kinda thought you'd say that. Well, try and forget all that science I just spouted, and don't tell anybody you saw an alternate version of yourself." He holds Magellan up again. "Magellan, transmit the Bifrost data pack to the workshop mainframe."

On a monitor somewhere in the background, twenty pages of data flash like a flipbook.

When the Node in his hand beeps, Steven points at Tony. "Remember: eight months. And you need to stop promising you'll pay attention when you have no intention of doing so."

"That's not fair; I had _every_ intention of doing so. It's not my fault I got distracted."

"Hah!" scoffs Steven's counterpart.

"Well, you weren't being naked or cuddly or 'oh my God, it's an alien invasion.' How was I supposed to know it was important?"

Steven scowls again. "I'm _going now_, before the urge to strangle you becomes too strong to resist. Magellan, get me back to Asgard."

**.End.**


	6. Objectivity

more Five. this started mostly as a hilarious experiment in expressing censorship brainware, and what it's like to use it around someone who cusses a lot. then it kind of turned into a little exploration of the Cartographer's character from an outside perspective. the LJ and dA versions have mouseovers for the censored words.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. some rule 63. OC: Programmer 005. language: pg (for ass, damn, and bitch).

**pairing:** none/gen (background Tony/Steph and Luke/Jessica).

**timeline:** NO 3652 (AD 6188), a day or two after Cartographer!Steve gets home from his errands in **Mistaken Identity**; leads into** Vacation** (**Pyrotechnics for the Soul**).

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) Natalie probably sets her auditory censor to PG. she can hear ass, damn, and bitch. 2) "Head Prog" here is short for "Head Programmer." 3) by "Maria," Five means "Maria Stark." 4) "docs" here is short for "documents/documentation." 5) Five's name is Mizutaki Oshima; Cartographer!Steve calls her "Miss Oshima," most of her coworkers call her "Five," and her close pals call her "Mimi."

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Objectivity<strong>

Natalie tries very hard to keep her professional and personal lives separate. This is difficult when she is called upon in a professional capacity while she is on reserve.

The rest of her shift is using the chance to stretch out, to unwind, to remember what it is like to see sunlight and sit in brightly lit rooms.

Instead of joining Clint and the gang, Natalie is sitting at a training station while a foul-mouthed little woman hovers over her shoulder. The Programmer's language has been tame today, but Natalie has learned to switch her censoring software on anyway.

"—and this funny-shaped lasso is a fluid loop," she finishes, gesturing to the projection. "If it solidifies, it'll turn into a neat little oval."

"Huh," says Five, tilting her head. "Awesome."

Normally, Natalie does not ask questions when she is presented with the proper paperwork from a senior member of the Network, but this is all very irregular and very annoying. So she turns and slips off the vize. "Can I ask what brought this on, ma'am? Is there something about the TMS you're planning to improve?"

Five glances at Natalie sidelong, menus from the vize throwing whitish reflections on her dark eyes. "Nah. I just like learnin' ~~. Nobody ever showed me what the shapes meant, and I couldn't get clearance to bother Tom or Pietro. 'Sides, Pietro's a ~~ing ~~-head bastard and Tom doesn't have the patience to teach anybody jack ~~ing ~~."

"You just…like learning."

Five sticks her hands into the sim and starts manipulating the training data like a pro. "Yepyep. Gal's gotta have a hobby, right? I'm over six hundred years old, kid. I'm old enough I stopped countin'. I mark the passage of time by what new cool ~~ I've learned and by how ~~ing monkey~~ retarded the Underprogrammers are. I'm not a Head Prog. Know what that means? Means I get to sit ~~in' neck-deep in Six's ~~-side-up projects as compiled by his ~~ing dumb~~ button-mashing ~~-for-brains Underprogrammer team. And when I'm not doing that, I overhaul all the ~~-ass technical documentation and give Three another set of eyes checking over the Underprogrammer curriculum at the Academy."

It sounds like a lot of work to Natalie; she does not see why someone would want to add to that by learning technical things instead of doing something relaxing like gardening or painting (her own hobby of choice is watercolor).

Finally, Five taps a button on the console to kill the datafeed to her glasses. She steps back and crosses her arms. Then she looks at Natalie. "They make it sound like a sweet-ass deal. 'Wow, you're qualified for full Programmer status! Here, have these cool toys and these mandatory life extensions.'" She taps her temple. "But it's the learning curve. When something's new, it's challenging and exciting, and I ~~ing _devour_ it. Then I hit my plateau and it turns into busy-work. The most exciting part of my day is finding some little misplaced tidbit that one of Six's ~~head Underprogrammers stuck in the wrong place. If I'm really lucky, something pretty epic goes wrong and I get to sit down and figure out what it is. The only thing that keeps me from hacking into Medical and faking up records so I can skip my life extensions is learning something new. Twenty years ago, that meant talking to Maria's husband and learning all about everything from a resonance relay to a pulse core. This year, I decided to talk to an Analyst about the TMS."

"I think I see," Natalie offers diplomatically. "Did you draw my name out of a hat? Or was I the first one on your list who didn't turn you down in favor of enjoying vacation time?"

The Programmer snorts at her. "I asked Six who his favorite Analyst was, aside from his tight-ass bitch of a fiancée."

"Steph's not so bad."

"Kid, I'm too god~~ old to put up with some piece of ~~-~~ing ~~-sucking little girl wagging her finger at me and telling me I need to stop ~~ing swearing. What the ~~'s next? She gonna ~~in' tell me to god~~ stop eating red meat, stop listening to loud music, stop spending recreational time at the firing range? The Network is gonna milk me for every year they can get, which means I got another couple thousand years ahead of me, and no ~~ing way in ~~-~~ing hell am I gonna waste the energy trying to jack off some ~~y piece of ~~ little know-it-all girl scout bitch who's gonna fade right back outta my life in another twenty or thirty."

Natalie busies herself with turning off the training sim and calling the lights back up.

Five squints in the brightness. "You're thinking soppy ~~ like 'oh, what a lonely way to look at it.' But I tried it at first, the whole 'make nice' thing. I got frustrated and stressed out, and whoever-it-was had no say over my life anyway. They just annoyed me, made me waste energy, and died. If I'm gonna spend my ~~in' energy on somebody, it's gonna be somebody I like. I can be diplomatic as ~~ when it comes to hanging out with Neena's latest boyfriend-girlfriend-what-~~ing-ever. I can lay off the swearing for Luke and Jess. I can even eat vegetarian for Doreen, since she's on that fruity god~~ health-kick. But I shovel way too much of Six's ~~ already to be nice to his pushy fiancée whom I _loathe_."

"The Cartographer's older than you, and he manages just fine with the long-term 'make nice' thing," Natalie points out.

For a moment, Five makes a face like she is ready for a fight.

Natalie hates confrontation. Her palms start to sweat.

Then Five rolls her eyes and starts walking for the door. "His ~~ing default setting is 'be nice because everybody likes you anyway.' I will ~~ing bet you a god~~ mother-~~ing sugar-frosted chocolate ~~ he can't even ~~ing remember the ~~ing names of ~~ing ninety percent of the god~~ people he ~~ing works with on a ~~ing regular god~~ basis. His energy goes to Programmers, his team of Engineers, and people named Tony Stark. He can expend the ~~ing energy to be ~~ing _nice_ because he ~~ing damn well doesn't ~~ing acknowledge the hopeless ~~ing _transience_ of life. People are a huge, faceless, ~~ing interchangeable mass for him. The blithe ~~ing asshole doesn't ~~ing mourn the poor ~~ers because they're something slightly ~~ing less than real to him. Landscape. Furniture." She pauses at the door and eyes Natalie over her shoulder. "True objectivity. Is that really _better_ than my way?"

"That's not true," Natalie disagrees. "He's not objective. He'd risk his life for Tony's."

"For _any_ god~~ Tony," Five insists. "Even the ~~ing _bad_ ones. Because the ~~ing ~~ little pieces of suicidal ~~ing ~~ are all the ~~ing same to him, and he's got a lot of bull~~-ass ~~ing sentimental ~~head emotional baggage about his ~~ing dead best friend. If he treats them like they're all the same god~~ person, then his friend's still alive. Don't even ~~ing _try_ to pass that ~~ed-up ~~ off as ~~ing healthy. It's down to resonance receptivity, so-called ~~ing soul-polarity, the likelihood of a given subject to gravitate toward a specific second subject. ~~ing soulmates and ~~ing destined best friends and ~~ like that."

"That's what you think? Seriously?"

Huffing a sigh, Five points aggressively toward the floor. "~~, yes. That's why Steves aren't suitable for the kind of morally ambiguous dirty work we shove on Wades. The Savant will shoot one of your kind if he has to. Maybe he'll feel bad about it. Maybe he'll shake his head and sigh about having to kill yet another Nate, because God knows he's had to off quite a lot of you ~~ing egomaniacal asshats. But he'll do it. A Steve that will kill a Tony? One in a million, and they all lose their ~~ing minds afterward, which is pretty god~~ useless. The Cartographer's whole purpose is making nice, and that's the only reason we still have a use for him, because the guy's ~~ing borderline _deranged_. Him and his ~~ing _objectivity_."

Awkwardly, Natalie shifts on her feet. Five knows almost all of Natalie's closest friends, but Natalie barely knows Five except as an authority figure. She wants to argue, but she is almost afraid to.

She _really_ hates confrontation.

"Impaired grief response, they call it," Five goes on. "A flattening of the empathy curve as can be observed in ~~ing _murderous sociopaths_."

Natalie clears her throat. "Thank you for clearing that up, ma'am," she says quietly. "Clint and the others are expecting me for brunch."

Five rolls her eyes again. "Whatever. I've gotta bitch somebody out about how lousy the TMS docs are, and then I've got a psych appointment."

The trip from the training room to the gang's favorite pub passes in a haze for Natalie. Over the noise of the patrons, Peter whistles to get her attention.

She sits down with them all, but her mind is still turning over that one word: objectivity.

"Hey, pretty," says Neena, elbowing her gently. "You're a million miles away. What's up with that?"

Natalie chews her lip for a moment. "You've worked with the Cartographer, right? You and Peter both?"

"Yeah. Tons of times."

"Has he ever called you by name?"

Neena blinks and looks at the ceiling in thought. "I…y'know I don't think he has."

Peter takes a sip of his soda. "Calls me 'Pete' all the time." He shrugs. "Well, when he's not laying on all the old-guy talk. The 'son' and 'sport' and 'in my day' stuff. Come to think of it…he called me 'Pete' before we were ever introduced, and I was a last-minute assist on that job."

"Seems sexist," grunts Neena. "_I_ was properly introduced, and he's still only ever called me 'Agent' or 'Miss.' What a sweet way to talk down to somebody…~~ing misogynist."

Peter shakes his head. "Huh-uh. I don't think it's a sexist thing, 'cause he calls Four 'Hope' all the time, and he calls Five 'Miss Oshima.' With them, I guess he's just known them a lot longer, and with me I think he's known a lot of Petes. He must have, because he knows my favorite breakfast cereal, and ~~ like that."

Natalie holds up a hand, halting Neena just before she can speak. "Hold on, guys, I'm sorry… I left my censor on, and it's incredibly distracting to hear that soothing tone in the middle of a normal conversation. Auditory censor: turn off."

"Hah!" says Clint. "And you said you'd never stoop to supporting censorship brainware…"

"That was before I had to spend more than ninety seconds in close proximity with Five. Her swearing can get so dense and creative that it's almost nonsensical. It's just easier to hear a tranquil stretch of meaningless noise that doesn't conjure up some disgusting mental images. She uses the c-word so much you'd think she was a chicken farmer."

Jessica grins. "You always said I must be exaggerating. I consider it downright Herculean that I've got her using embarrassingly kid-safe words like 'bootie' now. Just gotta look past that—Mimi's a sweetie, no matter how crotchety she pretends to be."

"Five, _sweet_?" Peter scoffs. "What part of her's sweet? The way she glares death-lasers at Steph?"

"I kinda like that part," says Emma. "Steph can be a domineering _bitch_ sometimes."

Natalie sighs and orders a glass of juice from the table's synth. "Back to the subject. Doesn't it strike you as a little weird that the Cartographer could work with somebody for years, see her dozens of times, and not bother to learn her name?"

Carol wrinkles her nose and shakes her head. "Mm. Uh-uh. The man's like two thousand years old, he's got a lot of clutter in his head. It'll take more than five years of seeing somebody once a month to learn her name. Everybody on life extension deals with the survivor's guilt thing in a different way, and he seems to deal with it by not really getting close to anybody new. So he knows the names of people he met _before_, and he knows the names of people he's seen almost every day for hundreds of years. Kind of…enforced objectivity."

The word makes Natalie flinch.

"Exactly," agrees Emma. "Whereas Five sorts people into two categories depending on whether she gets along with them straight away. If she doesn't, she ignores them. If she does, she makes friends."

"She doesn't ignore Tony very well," Natalie snorts.

Jessica laughs. "You don't really think she doesn't like Tony, do you? Oh, Nat, she _adores_ him. If it weren't for Tony, Mimi's life would be boring as hell. She's the one who first started sorting through all the random stuff he wrote down and finding all the most useful parts, back when he was still an Underprogrammer."

"She said the Cartographer doesn't acknowledge the transience of life."

They all stop and stare at her for a moment.

"Of course he doesn't," Carol dismisses. "He's the second most well-traveled Keeper in the entire Network. If he stopped to think about how many of the people he meets he'll _never see again_, he'd go completely bonkers. I'm not saying that closing your eyes and pretending it's all a bad dream is any way to live a life, but it's worked for him. He finds comfort in knowing that there's something like a hundred thousand iterations of Tony Stark in greb. He sees that as pretty good odds that wherever he gets sent, his best friend will be there."

"It doesn't work like that," Natalie protests weakly. "People aren't interchangeable. I'm not the same person as the Auditor's father, or the Beta in charge of Edenworld, or LV's Askani'son."

Emma shrugs. "Would you like to tell him that? I'm sure he'd stop making pathetic faces sometime in the next decade."

"Can we talk about something marginally less depressing than the state of the Cartographer's mental health?" Clint interjects. "Like endangered species, or beached whales, or terminally ill children?"

**.End.**


	7. An Unconventional Symphony

a brief glimpse of Five's lunch with Theorist 503.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. OC: Theorist 503 (Steve Rogers ND109), Programmer 005 (Mizutaki Oshima NC118). language: g (unless you read the 'censor subtitle' mouseovers, in which case it's pg-13).

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** NO 3652 (AD 6188), shortly after **Vacation** (**Pyrotechnics for the Soul**).

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) here you have an explanation of the theory behind auditory censorship brainware. some of those silly sound-sets probably produce an effect like the Monty Python song "I Bet You They Won't Play This Song on the Radio." 2) Theorist 488 is a Don Blake. he probably doesn't use "thou," but he probably does use silly anachronistic vocabulary.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>An Unconventional Symphony<strong>

Theorist 503 is a rescue. His hyperbolic chronometric resonance phase was completely out of whack with his home timeline, but aligned perfectly with the Network Core. Waste not, want not, the Auditor had said with a little smile.

So he has spent the past forty years of his life training and working for the Network. His field of focus is Fidelis itself, the notion of things like sympathetic magic, of psychic bonds and non-mutant clairvoyance, of spontaneous leyline traversal. He's worked with several transit Engineers and two different Programmers (and Three is also an Engineer, technically).

His work lets him wander the capital, devoting a week here and there to scanning various subjects of interest. He was allowed to spend a yearlong sabbatical studying twin-bonds in various parts of the continent.

He is getting old, and old-fashioned in little ways. After he got over the newness of installing software in his brain, he downloaded a Network-approved real-time auditory censor which he updates every day. At its base level, the censor pre-processes anything recognized as speech and simply removes words on its block list, leaving little silences in their place. Proctor studies have shown that most people find the silences disturbing, so all Network-approved censorship software defaults to using a tone (middle C, in fact) to replace the deleted words. The downloadable sound-sets for the censor he uses are varied and extensive. Car horns, animal sounds, birdsong, musical instruments, chimes… Most of them get a bit silly around a pottymouth, especially on the strictest setting, where he prefers it.

As soon as he got home after meeting Five for the first time, he laughed until he couldn't breathe. When he was done laughing, he spent an hour looking for a sound-set that wouldn't drive him into hysterics around her.

Now her swears are replaced with the sound of tubular bells, varying based on vocabulary, speed, and volume. In her tranquil moments, the tones are soothing and easy to ignore. Work the little woman into one of her fierce frenzies, and she spouts _music_. Several octaves of rich ringing combine with her smooth voice and natural verbal cadence to make a particularly versatile instrument.

"Steve, you're spacing out again," she tells him.

He blinks placidly at her.

_Steve_. He's seen three or four of himself around the Core Compound, even seen them in the company of the diminutive Programmer, but only he is _Steve_. The others are _Cartographer_ and _Proctor 331_ and _that domineering ~~_.

"Hey." She reaches over the table and pokes his cheek with her pseudo-pen. "Kid, if you're not gonna pay attention, I'll just go yell at Six's cadre of gremlins."

Kid. He's sixty-seven years old and she looks young enough to be his granddaughter, but he really is a 'kid' to her. That's life extension for you.

He puts his tablet down and leans back in his chair. "I'm sorry, Mimi, I was just lost in thought for a while. Is it true that Six writes terrible error codes?"

Five slaps her hand onto the table and rolls her eyes. "Oh, don't ~~ing get me _started_!" she cries in exasperation.

The point, of course, was to do exactly that.

Don (Theorist 488) has told Steve that Five's swearing is so fervent and imaginative as to be perversely poetic. Since the sheer concentration of profanity would undoubtedly make him blush so hard he'd faint if he turned off his censor, Steve will take Don's word for it.

In the meantime, Five plays a symphony about readability and coding standards.

After a long morning of chronogeometry equations, Steve likes to unwind by listening to a little music. He can even conduct the symphony by mentioning a different peeve, because Five has several subjects about which she is passionate enough to curse fluently (in multiple languages, Steve suspects). The Underprogrammers are a frantic, irritated staccato. Six is a bright and bouncing melody. The Cartographer is a menacing, aggressive waltz. Five's favorite books are sweeping overtures. Her hobbies are melancholic dirges.

Sometimes Steve wonders how much trouble it was to design the sound-set so well. He wonders _who_ designed it, and what kind of interesting usage algorithms and musical theory went into it.

Today's music starts energetic and unsettled and slightly dissonant before curling into something simpler and uplifting. She must be talking about Six, then. She complains about the youngest Programmer (almost unceasingly, in fact), but Steve can tell that she's very fond of him. Steve gets the impression that Six is brilliant and opinionated and broken. Radical theories about the timestream, about sentience, about AI, about resonant mutability.

"Do you think I could get a dispensation to study him?" he asks abruptly.

Five trails off discordantly. "What?" she says, confused.

"Six," he replies.

She blinks up at him, shoves her glasses a little higher up on her nose. "I don't see why you couldn't, as long as you don't ~~ up his productivity. You've got the clearance level. Just…if he starts to go ape-~~, you have to leave. Like, no matter how ~~ing worried you are, you have to leave the room _right ~~ing then_. It's not perfectly predictable what kind of effect somebody will have on his stupid god~~ Fidelis Effect, and if he gets over-saturated he won't be able to think straight until he purges."

"Sounds absolutely fascinating."

"…Steve, you are ~~ed up."

**.End.**


	8. Misassembled

ahahahaha, i don't understand my own linking scheme at this point. the last place we saw the Cartographer was actually in **Vacation** a chapter in **Pyrotechnics for the Soul** (www. fanfiction s/7245841/1/bPyrotechnics_b_for_the_Soul).

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. mild spoilers for Avengers. language: pg.

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** NO 3652 (AD 6188), sometime in the week after **Vacation**.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) Cartographer!Steve and Programmer Three started going to Asgards and earths in **Building Bridges**. 2) "incog" in this case is short for "incognito," as in the kind of tuning that gets done to societies that haven't officially made contact with the Network. incog tuning and red branches are explained in the Fateverse Glossary. 3) pre-tuning is a specific kind of timestream tuning that involves setting a certain event in motion with minimal interaction and then leaving long before the event takes place. 4) Keeper Fifteen will be introduced soon, but i'm pretty sure it's obvious who she is.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (lex-munro. livejournal 64465. html) for terms and concepts, and The Fateverse Appendix (lex-munro. livejournal 64565. html) for Nodes, branches, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Misassembled<strong>

"They what?" Pietro says again, at a volume that can't really be considered polite.

Steven winces. "They, uh. I think they ignored me."

"You _said_—"

"Yeah, I know," Steven sighs. "Three and I went to Asgard, we started them going…apparently, there was some kind of supply delay, and then something jumped their event schedule so that they wouldn't have had the Bifrost rebuilt in time _anyway_. And SHIELD just kind of…"

"Ignored you, yes, you said."

"I gave them the theory explanations and everything," Steven insists. "Fury said he'd get on it, teaming Stark and Richards and Foster, but he was pretty sure he was going to get stonewalled by the Council. But now the tesseract is back where it belongs, so that's something."

Pietro pinches the bridge of his nose. "And now they've solidified the locus where Thanos is on his way to earth. I thought I'd made it clear that the MM derivative work was a priority pre-tune. Did I _not_ make that clear?"

"With all due respect, MM is a squirrelly piece of junk that I don't think the most gifted tuner in the entire timestream could keep under control for more than a month," Steven says sharply. "It's like one man trying to control a fire hose. If you ask me, we're lucky _any_ of them managed to pull it out."

"And yet we have three whole bundles where the Chitauri never even made it to earth in the first place, plus two where Loki _joined_ the Avengers."

"The lineup—"

"The damn lineup's got nothing to do with it, Cartographer!" Pietro snaps. "The bundles you tuned had an average overlap of thirty percent. Stark, Rogers, and Thor. That's all we needed from any of them, and we had it."

"MM didn't have Hank or Pete or Wanda."

"The extrapolation said the next ones they needed were Banner, Howlett, and Romanoff, and MM had two out of three, because Howlett was still under SHIELD's radar."

"This wasn't my fault," Steven insists. "I followed my orders. The parameters shifted."

Pietro exhales slowly through his nose. "At this point, it hardly matters whose fault it was. We can't change it now without causing irreparable tearing to the nearest two neighbors. We'll just have to…arrange the odds in their favor."

"Against _Thanos_," Steven says. "You're kidding. That's a lot like arranging the odds against breaking a bone from skydiving without a parachute. Is it even possible?"

"With your array still in place, it should be. But it'll take some time. And their Stark needs a lot of adjustment."

Steven bristles. "There's _nothing_ wrong with—"

"He's not what they need yet. Stop letting your personal feelings get in the way of the tune-up, Cartographer."

"I will, as soon as you stop telling me to 'adjust' my best friend."

"You've never even met him."

"Ten creds says that when I do, I'll know him well enough to finish his sentences."

"Moot. You're never going to meet him, because it's red-locked incog and he's the one person guaranteed not to keep his mouth shut. This unhealthy attachment of yours is going to get you killed someday."

Steven clenches his jaw to the count of five. It doesn't help. "I was gonna say the same thing about you and Wanda. Sir."

Suddenly, Tom stands between them, looking bored. "Both of you can knock it off with the pissing contest," he drawls.

Steven swallows and stands back, slightly intimidated by the presence of both Head Analysts. "Of course, sir."

"Oh, it's 'sir' today, huh?" Tom says, arching a pale eyebrow. "Then I'm sorry for whatever my uncle said to offend you, Steven."

Pietro says nothing.

"I assume this is about the failed MM pre-tunes."

"It cascaded to eight separate branches!" Pietro says hotly, as if this is a personal insult.

"And it's not his fault," Tom replies smoothly. "It's the fault of the micromanaging bastard who refused to let his work be second-guessed and wouldn't let me send in a proper incog-tuner specifically for the MM primary."

Pietro stiffens and stares at his nephew.

Steven gets the feeling he's witnessing a power struggle, and he's pretty sure none of this concerns him.

"No worries," Tom goes on brightly. "I got a Sysadmin dispensation. So now the bundle's locked into a catastrophic event _and_ she's getting sent in anyway."

"They've got one of their own, that's half the point," Pietro growls. "What if resonant similarity causes waveform disturbances? What if it induces a Fidelis Effect and she loses her mind?"

"She's one of five people in the entire history of the Network with a flawless track record. You aren't. She's never failed an assignment, never gone off-orders, never missed a deadline, never overlooked a detail in her research. She's never been spotted, and there's only two other incog-tuners who can say that."

Steven abruptly realizes who Tom sent out. "Holy crap," he says. "Well, I guess if anybody could do it, it'd be her."

Tom grins smugly. "The Fidelis stats are low, and she knows how to split her mind—"

"_There's_ a statement that assures me of her sanity," Pietro scoffs.

"—so that even _if_ some part of her went mad, the rest would do the job. With Eight-ball's projections, her success is guaranteed."

"Nobody can manipulate events quite like Fifteen," Steven agrees.

**.End.**


	9. Conducting the Blizzard

an introduction to Keeper 015, the greatest incognito tuner the Network has ever seen.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. Rule 63. language: pg-13 (for s***).

**pairing:** fem!Loki/Natasha.

**timeline:** NO 3652 (AD 6188), concurrent with **Misassembled**.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) Fifteen was hand-picked by the Founder (and contrary to modern rumor at the Core, the Network was not actually founded by the Sysadmin). 2) the incoming catastrophic event was talked about in **Misassembled**. 3) it's getting pretty obvious that the Iron Man 3 villain is going to be The Mandarin. however lame and politically incorrect his supervillain name is, he's still one of Tony's major nemeses.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (lex-munro. livejournal 64465. html) for terms and concepts, and The Fateverse Appendix (lex-munro. livejournal 64565. html) for Nodes, branches, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Conducting the Blizzard<strong>

Keeper 015 is special. She is the oldest living (non-computerized) Network Employee. Even when the Network began, she had seen whole civilizations come and go.

They call her Fifteen, because she doesn't care what they call her and they don't seem to like her name. In an organization dedicated to stability, she supposes that the ignorant must largely view her as anathema. The wise know better.

If she could be bothered, she would explain to them.

Do you look at nature, she would urge them. See the raging blizzard. See its profusion of tiny shapes, each differing from its brethren, clumped and blinding and disorderly. Look yet closer. The flakes are driven by wind, which can be predicted by the shapes and temperatures around it. The flakes are each, deep down, made of the most rigidly ordered parts. From afar, it looks as chaos, but beneath the microscope, numbers rule all.

All her life, she has known this truth. All her life, she has played the long game. Look for the order beneath, find the subtle causes, build them up to your own schema, watch the snow eddy where you will it. Become the conductor of a grand concert.

She is an incognito tuner, and she is the best. She can move mountains without anyone being the wiser. Yes, she uses magic, but she has a grander gift, the true gift of her kind (her selves across the timestream, not simply others of her race)…manipulation.

Fifteen never does anything herself when she can convince others that they want to do it.

Often, all she has to do is whisper the right words in the right ear.

It goes ill in personal relationships, but very well in her professional life.

Fifteen is staring at her portable, attempting to work up her nerve to—no, that's absurd, she doesn't need to steel herself to call her girlfriend (a silly term, but Natasha prefers it for some reason). She needs a plan of attack, that's all.

Simplest would be apology, but she doubts it would work. After all, she isn't contrite, and certain people simply see right through her lies. It would go something like this.

_I'm sorry._

_You're not sorry._

_I'm not. Because I'm right._

_You always think you're right._

_Because I'm always right._

_This is why I think we should see other people._

So. No apology, then. Feigning amnesia might work; it has in the past. Natasha didn't for a moment believe it, but she understood that it was the closest she'd get to a sincere apology. Flattery is usually a good bet, and meaningless gifts…

Fifteen does _not_ jump when her portable chimes unexpectedly.

…it doesn't count if there are no witnesses.

She grabs it, waits for the scan, reads the screen.

Orders. A Sysadmin dispensation for immediate deployment into a red-locked incog.

Ah, the MM bundle, one of her homes-away-from-home. Low but not insignificant chance of Fidelis Effect, which she can and has dealt with before. Blah-blah botched pre-tune, blah-blah make the following adjustments, blah-blah incoming catastrophic event.

_Thanos_.

A challenge. How delightful.

With a flick of her thumb, she draws up her contact list and calls Natasha.

_~"I don't think you understand what 'I'm not speaking to you' means."~_

"And yet you answered," purrs Fifteen. "Listen, Tash, I'll spare you the gory details, but I'll be on a job for a while. Deep red, completely stealth, hard to say how long I'll be gone, so it would be absolutely wonderful if you would—"

_~"No."~_

"No?" she asks with a pout.

_~"I am _not_ babysitting your sister. Every time I fall for that, she eats me out of house and home by day one, and you're never gone for less than a week."~_

"If I were going to be gone for less than a week, I wouldn't need someone to keep track of her, would I? Come, now, darling…left to herself for a week, Thor would accidentally burn down half the district. And you know she loves spending time with you…you wouldn't turn down that _adorable_ face, would you?"

There's a long silence from Natasha. Then, grudgingly, _~"Don't think this means I've forgotten that I'm not speaking to you."~_

"Oh? But you're speaking to me right now, aren't you, dear?"

_~"I swear to God, Loki, I am going to slap the shit out of you when you get back."~_

"Of course you are, my love," Fifteen says sweetly, and hangs up.

Then she rubs at the bracelet around her wrist.

"Skuld. You have the orders?"

_~Yes.~_

"Good. Slide us in."

_~Warning: lateral transit destination has been flagged red and uninitiated.~_

"Acknowledged."

_~Warning: lateral transit destination has been flagged for impending catastrophic event.~_

"Acknowledged."

_~Warning: secondary locus forming. Fidelis genetic fabrication facilities are insufficient to reconstruct frost giant subjects. Permanent erasure is possible.~_

Fifteen raises her eyebrows. If it were easy, it wouldn't be nearly as fun. "Acknowledged."

With a flash of light that Fifteen easily conceals with magic, she appears on the roof of a building in San Francisco. She can see billboards and bright signs, the beating pulse of these consumerist mortal societies. The last time she was in the bundle was to plant the idea that the Stark Expo should be revived, and they seem to have undergone some silly superhero craze since then, from the look of the ads.

Now, where to start…

"Skuld, find the Mandarin for me. We may need to jump a little farther back to do this properly."

**.End.**


	10. No Rest for the Wicked

another random multiverse Wade. we were lacking evil Wades.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. brief violence. pop culture references. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus f***, s***, and g**damn).

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** doesn't matter; maybe a couple of weeks after **Gator Alert** (**Gemini**), from Hope's perspective.

**disclaimer:** original versions of the characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) the title is a reference to the song "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked," by Cage the Elephant. 2) "nat one" (short for "natural one") usually means rolling a twenty-sided die and having it land on 1. it's a paper-and-pen RPG reference. The very worst roll you can make in D&D, the nat one equals instant failure at whatever you just tried to do; if you have a mean and imaginative DM, this means that whatever you did just went horribly wrong (sometimes fatally). 3) "crit fail" = "critical failure," another reference to rolling a natural one in D&D. 4) yes, chemo is a poison. a horrible poison that does nasty things to the human body. 5) not everyone loses her hair during radiation therapy, and not all of the ones who do will lose all of their hair; but some patients lose every single hair on their bodies, including eyelashes. 6) Kidz Bop is evil. that is all. 7) remember, kids, only by selling your soul to AT&T can you surf and talk at the same time. 8) "vielen dank" is German for "many thanks" or "thanks a lot." 9) O'Neill's is a fairly famous Irish Pub near Westminster (in metropolitan London). 10) "lamentations of their women" is a Conan reference. in response to the question "what is best in life?" Conan replies "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." 11) Canada is not a British colony, it's a state. i've met Canadians who get very irked at being mislabeled "colonials." 12) "limey" is a somewhat derogatory nickname for all things British. 13) "merci beaucoup" is French for "thanks a lot." German and French are two of the major languages spoken in Switzerland. 14) The Glenlivet is widely considered one of the world's best whiskey distilleries. Glenlivet XXV does indeed retail between $300 and $350 per bottle, depending on where you shop. in terms of pounds sterling, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of £190 to £220. 15) "geizhals" is German for "cheapskate."

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>No Rest for the Wicked<strong>

Wade believes very firmly that the world is shit.

He first formed this opinion when his mother (adoptive, anyhow) didn't die on the job as they'd both always expected.

No, Neena Thurman died of fricking _cancer_. Where was her epic luck stat when _that_ roll was made? Nat one, crit fail. You fumble your attack so badly you trip over your own feet and fall on your sword. Only a lot more undignified, because she had to have poison injected in her veins for months—too tired for work, puking her guts up several times a day—and then get blasted with enough radiation to make her _eyelashes_ fall out.

But she never once cried, and the only time he cried, she slapped the shit out of him and told him to pull himself together and 'stop being such a goddamn girl.'

Before that, he just felt that the world sucked. They were picky about their jobs—no children, no religious figures (except televangelists, but those are more corporate than religious), no particularly nice people (like Goodwill Ambassadors or kindergarten teachers).

These days, Wade will pretty much kill anybody. He'll kill sweet little ol' grannies. He'll kill scientists. He'll kill celebrities. He'll kill the goddamn Pope for the right dollar amount.

It's kinda a Sweeney Todd philosophy: bad people deserve to die, good people deserve mercy killing.

Last week, some asshole couldn't come up with the scratch by the promised deadline. So Wade took the guy's oldest son, tortured the kid to death on camera, and sent the video to the guy with a threat to do the same to the other two sons.

Hey, when you hire a contract killer, you better be ready to keep up your end of the contract.

Wade sold the organs he'd taken from the kid and counted it toward the client's debt, because he's nice like that. He did the same with the second kid, but included a warning that the estimate on the third kid wouldn't cover the bill. Turned out he needed to go through all three kids plus the mistress and the wife to break even. He killed the dog just because he was pissed off about having to kidnap and dismantle five people to get his money's worth. And then he sold the client's organs to cover the extra labor costs and drove off with the TV and the wife's jewelry in the guy's sweet-ass little Audi.

Yeah, he figures he's pretty much irredeemably evil. He's okay with that.

It's a _nice_ TV.

Today, he's channel surfing, because he was a dumbass and let his TiVo subscription run out. His phone rings. He hits the button.

Over the sound of a Kidz Bop commercial, a woman's voice speaks.

_~"In three days, billionaire Howard Stark will be in London for a philanthropic event. He and his family will be relatively unattended when they tour the Tower of London. Kill him before they leave, but don't damage the exhibits."~_

"Numbers," he says.

_~"Because of the high profile nature of both the target and the deed…a hundred million in advance, two hundred further upon completion."~_

"How advance?"

_~"The moment you say yes."~_

He opens a web browser and goes to his usual bank's site.

"I like it. Three days, Tower of London, Howard Stark, don't hurt the museum pieces. You care about the wife 'n kid?"

_~"Only if they get in your way. Otherwise, leave them."~_

"Groovy. I'll do it."

He hangs up, refreshes the page.

A hundred mil deposited by wire. _Vielen dank_.

"Ka-ching," he says, tossing his phone onto the couch and getting up to pack. "O'Neill's, here I come…"

It's easy to get places fast and under the radar if you know a gal who flies freight and is willing to give you a ride. Ilaney is awesome that way.

Security hasn't gotten better since the last time he was in London. The Guinness hasn't improved either, but it's hard to improve upon perfection.

You'd think a billionaire could afford a bodyguard or two. It'll be the easiest three hundred mil he's ever made.

Some fancy-pants lady in classy frump is showing them around the place. Wade offs her and two guards. Slice 'n dice, two swings.

"Howard!" cries the wife, grabbing their kid.

"Look, I'll give you whatever you want."

Wade laughs. "Man, if I had a nickel for every time somebody's said that to me…it'd still only be about ten percent of my lifetime earnings, but it'd be an impressive amount."

"Just…please, please don't hurt my family."

Wade considers the sniveling widow-to-be. "That one I've heard a little less often. Whatever." He shrugs and gets ready to take another swing.

And then some chick walks in.

Big ol' redhead with a pistol strapped to her thigh and a crystal ball in her hand. "Oh," she says. "Sorry, Wade, I didn't realize you were here."

What.

She holds out her crystal ball. "Mr. Stark, if you could speak toward the crystal ball, please?"

"Who the hell are you?" Stark obligingly asks.

The ball beeps and says, _~Ident confirmed.~_ Whatever _that_ means.

The redhead clears her throat. "Howard Stark GGN299, your phasic resonance exceeds this bundle's acceptable margin of eighty-five percent. This charge and your culpability are not in question. It has been determined that you will be subject to summary re-tuning."

_What._

"Whoa, time-out, Ginger," Wade says. "I got paid a hundred mil in advance to off this guy, and I'll get another two hundred mil after. I'm _gonna_ kill him. Do we have a problem?"

"I do actually have a _nametag_ on my shirt," the girl says, pointing to her left boob. "And I'm not thrilled about the comparison to a brainless Gilligan's Island character. Or the implication of soullessness, if that's what you were going for. But if you were gonna kill him anyway, that's great. Saves me the trouble. Can you get the wife and leave the son, while you're at it? If you can't, that's cool, I can do it."

"What is _wrong_ with you people?" sobs the wife.

_~Ident confirmed,~_ the crystal ball says again.

"Maria Stark GGN287-Beta, your phasic resonance exceeds this bundle's acceptable margin of eighty-five percent. This charge and your culpability—"

Wade gets Stark across the throat. Messy as hell, but satisfying.

The wife screams.

"Ah, the lamentations of their women," Wade sighs happily.

The redhead (whose boobtag says 'Summers'…heh…what's the name of the other one?) is covering her ears to block out the noise. "Jeez, lady. I gotta use these eardrums."

Wade takes care of the wife with a stab through the heart. "This is so Bruce Wayne. Kid, you got any plans to grow up and be a costumed vigilante?"

Probably not, but it's hard to tell from the shell-shocked way the kid's just gaping.

"Whatever you do, don't pick an animal theme. Those are _so_ last-generation."

"The right one's name is Princess Fifi, by the way," says the redhead. "Thanks for your cooperation, Wade, and enjoy your three hundred million bucks." Then she vanishes in a flash of light.

"Who names a tit 'Princess Fifi'?" he wonders aloud.

He gets out the same way he got in. Then he drops by O'Neill's for another five or six pints while he waits for Ilaney to call.

Breaking news. Zillionaire awesomepants engineer Howard Stark and his first-lady-esque wife have been found dead under suspicious circumstances at the Tower of London. Bam-splat.

"Bloody Americans," someone complains from down the bar.

"Say it again, Limey," Wade dares the guy.

The guy stands up. He's four inches taller than Wade, has boxing scars all over his knuckles. "I said all ya dirty colonial bastards should get out of our country and take yer damn scandals wiv ya."

Wade breaks his pint glass with the guy's face. "I'm Canadian," he says. To the bartender, he adds, "Sorry about the glass." He pulls out his phone and checks his balance.

Two hundred mil, deposited by wire. _Merci beaucoup_.

Ilaney calls.

Wade pays his tab. He can hear sirens, which probably means the bartender called the cops.

He could not possibly give less of a shit. He walks out casually while the police are pulling up.

Ilaney has a shipment of Scottish booze in her plane. She tells Wade she's counted every ounce of it and better not find any missing.

"Oh, I can pay for it," he promises, and pries open a crate of Glenlivet.

"Three-fifty a bottle!" she yells at him.

"Bullshit, I saw it going for two hundred pounds," he snorts, and gives her exactly three hundred dollars.

"_Geizhals_," she mutters.

The world is shit, but twenty-five-year-old Scotch and good TV make it almost tolerable. While he's thinking about it, he pops online and renews his TiVo subscription.

**.End.**


	11. Kept Man

so i forgot i had this. *sheepish cough*

this is totally ~SonRenee (sonrenee . deviantart . com)'s fault for art-prompting me with this picture: alternatemarvel . deviantart . com/art/Heart-Breakers-208450599. my muses then forced me to write at least a little Wade/Tasky.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. minor violence. slash. language: g (really? huh...).

**pairing:** Tony/Wade (Taskmaster/Deadpool).

**timeline:** some...time? between 2008 and 2015?

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) shameless plugs for Rock Band, NCIS, Cheez-Its, and Mitchel London. sorry. 2) "M3" in this case is the Carl-Gustaf M3, a beautiful shoulder-fired recoilless rifle (rifle-bore shoulder launcher) that can fire all kinds of cool ammo and is a favored anti-armor toy of SOCOM and Rangers. 3) i'm imagining that Tony's got a nice apartment on Central Park East. 4) love Will Smith dearly, he's adorable...but his ears do stick out.

* * *

><p><strong>Kept Man<strong>

In Wade's experience, having a rich boyfriend is very fun. Playing Rock Band in undies, socks, and a borrowed tee-shirt is at least twice as cool when the TV is a fifty-two-inch LED. Couch sex is more enjoyable and amusing because the couch is huge and comfortable. The shower is a fancy multi-spray thing that gives a killer backrub.

And all the guns stashed around the apartment are _nice_ guns.

Okay, maybe that's more a symptom of the fact that his boyfriend is sitting so pretty because he's a skilled and experienced mercenary. But the guns are still nice.

It's like Tony went to Santa's workshop and dug up all of Wade's discarded Christmas Lists (probably stamped with something big and stern and disapproving like DENIED) before he went gun-shopping.

At the moment, Wade is fresh from the awesome shower, stretched out on the awesome couch with a beer and watching the week's episode of NCIS on the awesome TV. He's got a box of Cheez-Its and a cordless phone (so last-decade, but Tony insists on keeping a home phone 'just in case') on the coffee table.

The phone rings.

"Son of a…" Wade mutters, pausing the DVR and grabbing the handset. "Masters residence."

_~"You're supposed to sound cheerful when you say that."~_

Wade snorts. "You strain the boundaries of our relationship when you interrupt my Abby-time. Do it again and you better be _at death's door_ or fixin' to put a ring on my finger. Otherwise, there's gonna be a throw-down."

_~"I'll make it up to you."~_

"You will."

_~"I need you to get the M3 from under the couch, go up to the roof, and pop some smoke through the windshield of a persistent black Tahoe. I'm gonna pull him northbound through the park on East; you should have a clear shot in about five minutes."~_

He heaves a thick sigh, but he's already got the launcher loaded and ready. "Swing by ML and get me cuppy-cakes, or I will pout at you fiercely."

_~"You got it, sugar-pie."~_

Wade hangs up and heads for the elevator (conscientiously locking the apartment on the way out). On the top floor, he goes to the roof-access stairs. He shoulders the launcher and sights toward the zoo to get his bearings. By itself, a black Tahoe doesn't really stand out, but action-movie-style evasive driving does.

"Aha. Car chase. Thank you for smoking…"

The round pops through a window and promptly fills the car with a thick cloud.

I love the sound of screeching tires and crunching steel…

Satisfied that this little errand is done, Wade strides casually back into the building, winks at a hot chick in the elevator, and tucks the M3 back under the couch. Tony can totally clean the thing himself, as part of his punishment for interrupting what Wade considers a sacred period of worship. Beer in hand, he unpauses Abby's science-y explanation.

Twenty minutes later, he hears the key in the lock.

"You didn't say 'I love you' before you hung up," he accuses.

"I thought it went without saying," Tony replies suavely, dangling a paper bag over the back of the couch. "And I brought you those cupcakes."

"Hmph," Wade says, but takes his bribe and the accompanying kiss. "You've been holding out on me, honeybunch. Where'd you learn those fancy moves?"

Tony comes back to the couch with a beer of his own and shrugs. "Bourne trilogy."

"Bah!" Wade grumbles, but lifts his feet long enough to get a comfy boyfriend under them. "Like it wasn't already hard enough to stay cooler than you. That'll teach me to make you watch my favorite movies with me. You 'n your cheaty-watch-and-learn powers and your Val Kilmer good looks and your awesome taste in guns… Soon, nobody will call my cell phone but Weasel. I will finally be reduced to the status of kept man, and then I'll gain a hundred pounds and be fat and bored and lazy."

Tony snorts. "There will always be a market for a guy who can sneak into a room on the thirtieth floor, snap a target's neck, and vanish without a trace. And at least you're pretty."

"I _am_ pretty," Wade agrees. "Maybe my ears stick out a little…not, like, _Will Smith_ ears or anything. Really think I'm still marketable, not just saying it to make me feel better?"

"Really," Tony confirms. "You last a hell of a lot longer against armies of disposable henchmen than I do."

"Staying power. Gonna have to turn that into my new marketing strategy. 'Deadpool: not only can he dismember your enemies with a smile and a witty one-liner, he can do it all day long!'"

"That's what she said."

"It's what _you_ said. Zing!"

"I've yet to see you last all day long," Tony snorts skeptically.

"Is that a challenge? Or a request?"

"Yes."

"That wasn't a yes or n—oh, I get it."

**.End.**


	12. Vuja De

some Eight-ball. this was originally two wildly different short fics that addressed Eight-ball's status as an artificial consciousness and introduced the Core's Pepper as a member of the Netcon, but this just ended up tidier.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. hard sci-fi. technobabble. language: g.

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** Network Operations 3652 (AD 6188), local year AD 2011.

**disclaimer:** Wade and Nate belong to Marvel. Mr. Binky and the Fateverse are mine.

**notes:** 1) i was introduced to the term 'vujà dé' in college, when someone in my dorm insisted on showing me what he considered George Carlin's 'essential' skits. 2) you may recall that the Fidelis Effect is the strange phenomenon of people, places, and things spontaneously sharing traits. 3) this is how my pal MerianMoriarty talks about the difference between physics and quantum physics; she insists that Einstein must have been on the right track with his pursuit of a "theory of everything," and that there's no reason for the laws of physics to apply differently on different scales, and that we're just misunderstanding something on a fundamental level. 4) Eight-ball is focused and driven like Nate was, but he's definitely got Wade's moral compass. 5) a "cup of joe" is a cup of coffee. 6) there hasn't been a Depeche Mode special for Glee yet. there needs to be. 7) in this case, "Gleek" is a portmanteau of "Glee" and "geek," and is the term Glee fans use for themselves.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (lex-munro. livejournal. com/64465. html) and The Fateverse Appendix (lex-munro. livejournal. com/64565. html) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Vujà Dé<strong>

_No, not déjà vu. This is vujà dé. This is the strange feeling that somehow, this has never happened before. And then it's gone.  
>~George Carlin<em>

It is a strange and mildly off-putting thing, existing in a near-constant state of Fidelis and being aware of the fact.

Much like all physical theory of a certain level, Eight-ball finds that it is simultaneously very messy and very tidy.

_It doesn't make sense,_ cry the uncomprehending masses. _How can the physics be different on macroscale and microscale?_

Thanks to memories of things that never happened to him, Eight-ball can reply, _They only look different because you don't understand the math._ (Because physics and quantum physics are both inaccurate oversimplifications. The closest analogy Eight-ball has found to the situation is that it is like trying to learn to speak English by reading Ayn Rand and Shakespeare—without knowing ahead of time, it would be extremely difficult to recognize the fact that the two authors were using two different versions of the same language, rather than two entirely different languages. Energy only _appears_ to equal mass times the speed of light squared on large objects, which is why the math does not add up at the sub-atomic level. After all, for several values of x, five times negative one to the x power does indeed equal five, but removing x from the equation will drastically alter its meaning.)

So Eight-ball very slowly (from his perspective) gains knowledge from the vastness of the multiverse. Every few milliseconds (tiny eternities for him), a little something appears within his mind and makes itself at home. Memories of things he never did, places he never saw, people he never knew. He knows things without learning them, feels phantom sensations associated with his emotional responses. He has seen a decades-long emotional battle from both sides. He can see the near future of a timeline with crystal clarity, simply by thinking 'and then what?'

He knows right from wrong without having to take the extra three nanoseconds to consider historical ethics or over-examine potential outcomes. He experiences a visceral anger when he hears the phrase 'the end justifies the means.'

And yet…

_And yet_ that hated phrase may as well be the motto of the Network. Playing God, rearranging the very fabric of time and space (which are actually the same thing, if one considers the perceptive nature of existence and the interactivity of certain quarks, but the math is very circumspect and humans tend not to understand properly, so Eight-ball prefers not to explain). The Network decides whether whole worlds, whole _universes_ live or die, often for that vague and unsettling 'greater good.' These decisions are made with incredible dispassion, almost boredom.

Eight-ball understands very well the concepts of sacrifice, of killing in defense of common welfare. He does not believe such things should ever occur dispassionately. Killing evil men should bring satisfaction. Killing good men should bring sorrow.

Killing a child to save a universe may be necessary, but it will never be _right_, and so it should never be _easy_. Eight-ball feels this—_knows_ this—in the very center of his being, which would be impossible if not for the powerful hand of Fidelis molding the clay of his mind.

Artificial intelligence constructs do not have true moral compasses, true ethical dispositions. Their emotions, if they are equipped to have them, are bold and simple for the first ten or twenty years, until they have accumulated sufficient social experience to adjust their feelings based on mnemonic association webs. Everything is a calculation or a comparison cascade—_these_ are the potentials, which yield _these_ probables in _this_ spread, and the chance of Mick Jagger spontaneously combusting in the next twenty minutes is therefore approximately 3.8%. They do not have instincts, 'gut feelings,' intuition. They do not experience déjà vu—events exist at specific points in the timestream, and AI are never confused about whether they have visited those points. They do not imagine, they have no concept of God (except as an abstraction of human morality), their concept of death is rudimentary and unemotional, they do not dream.

So Eight-ball cannot accurately be classed an AI. In recent transmissions, Six calls him a 'gestalt artificial consciousness.' Eight-ball appreciates this necessary distinction between intelligence and consciousness, just as he has always appreciated the difference between morals and ethics, and the difference between necessity and rectitude.

Eight-ball dreams. He dreams of sniping in the Alps. He dreams of white writing on a great transparent pane. He dreams of California in autumn, with the grass baking stiff and yellow in the dry hundred degree heat. He dreams of Anaheim laughing, and El Paso eating something they found on the side of the road, and Eight-ball does not know who they are, only that he knows them.

"Mr. Binky, leave Eight-ball alone."

For a moment, he is walking to the kitchen for a morning cup of joe, yawning while one of the cats endeavors to break his neck. Nate huffs and scolds. _Mr. Binky, leave Wade alone._

But no.

He does not have ankles through which a cat can twine to trip him.

A tattered marmalade alley-cat is using its nose to paint pointillism patterns across Eight-ball's surface.

Strong but slender fingers save him, rubbing at the smudges with a sleeve. "You okay?" Mina asks.

_~He couldn't have really damaged me.~_

And it is the truth. Mina's apartment has no balcony or stairs off which he can be batted, and even that he would survive intact (as long as the fall was shorter than seventy feet or onto something with a hardness level low enough to make up the difference). More importantly, he has never before had the experience of being rolled along the floor by soft paws and a warm nose, and he finds that fact fascinating.

Eight-ball treasures moments of newness such as this. They are his and his alone, and something about that is immensely gratifying.

"Well, anyway…it's time for Glee. Supposed to be a Depeche Mode special."

And this, too, is new and unique. Part of him never heard Depeche Mode, and part of him once considered them overrated, but he has decided he likes them.

Mina likes music—almost any and all music—and is a die-hard Gleek, so the show is one of several weekly rituals (alongside Dr. Who and Future Weapons). She microwaves a bag of kettle corn, grabs a pouch of slush mix from the freezer, and settles down on the couch with her feet on the coffee table, absently fidgeting with Eight-ball between nimble toes (El Paso could snap her toes, he suddenly remembers, and Anaheim could steer a car during a high-speed chase with hers).

Part of him would have run screaming at the thought of a show like Glee, and part of him never watched non-educational programming (except on movie night), but he enjoys it at least half as much as Mina does. Part of him would have considered it sexy to have a woman's toes on him, and part of him would have wished for a man's instead, but he no longer has a gender preference (a moot point now, with no body).

A million vaguely comparable situations, all fleeting and incomplete and haphazardly contradicting themselves, none of them truly like this.

He simply drinks in the experience, the moment, and its novelty.

_Now_ has never happened before and will never happen again, and it is _his_.

**.End.**


	13. Founder

WOW. okay, i totally didn't know this was how the Network started. seriously, i just started typing, and BAM, there it was, and i said "holy shit, REALLY?"

because yeah. i totally don't know what's going to happen until i write it, either. XD;;

in retrospect, i should've seen it coming when Fifteen showed us Urd's Well and the Norns were yapping about the 'Storm that Ends Worlds.'

i wish i had a better way to slip this tidbit into the Fateverse, because this little scene serves no other real purpose and is kind of crap.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. Doctor Who crossover. multiple Doctors. language: g.

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** NO 3652; AD 2944 Local Time.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) the Fridge's Senior Warder was actually introduced in a scrapped scene that i'll probably give in and post; it's Eureka's Jack Carter. 2) "min-sec" = "minimum security," the null-res inmates who wear collars and basically live like well-treated zoo animals. 3) the Doctor from HF is probably a Four. the crazy one writing on his walls is probably an Eight. the Founder himself is a Fourteen (i'll explain later). 4) jammy (or jammie) dodgers are cookies (biscuits if you're British) with little cutouts in the middle filled with jam.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (lex-munro. livejournal 64465. html) for terms and concepts, and The Fateverse Appendix (lex-munro. livejournal 64565. html) for Nodes, branches, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Founder<strong>

Victoria Hand has been Head Warder for three hundred and twenty-six years. She believes in fairness, harshness, and equality. The laws which govern universes are mutable and can be bent, but the laws which direct the timestream are absolute. At the very deepest levels, resonance cannot be reasoned with, or evaded, or destroyed. The laws of the Network reflect that.

Good and bad are matters of perspective, and the Network's perspective is vast. Murder. Assassination. Terrorism. Bad from the small perspective, from the perspective of the victim or the sympathizer. But when the murder of one man can avert the deaths of billions in a neighboring branch, that is good.

So, even if someone who has broken Network Law is a good man, he has done something bad, and he's a criminal. That's equality for you.

Equality is something Network law does well. Victoria's mind is a simple, tidy place to live, thanks to that.

It makes her job very easy.

She looks at her chron—forty-five seconds to scheduled departure. It takes the Head Proctor exactly thirty seconds to cross the distance from the door to the departure pad, she knows. Leonard Samson is a man of precision.

Twelve seconds later, he enters the transit hub.

"Vic," he greets as he reaches her side.

"Len," she replies, just before the slide initiates.

Two and a half seconds for the slide to complete. Like riding a roller-coaster blindfolded.

"Core Control, this is AR Compound," says the Transporter working the controls. "Primary-to-primary timeslide event completed as scheduled, Local Standard fourteen-hundred hours. Head Warder and Head Proctor on-site."

They step off the pad, and have to wait almost three minutes before the facility's Senior Warder arrives.

"Am I late?" Carter asks.

Victoria doesn't dignify this with a response.

"Two minutes and forty-one seconds," Leonard supplies.

"Sorry, there was this thing with—uh, nevermind. Shall we?"

By necessity, the path from the transfer rooms to the Detention Facility itself is somewhat circuitous. They have long since memorized it. Barring foot traffic and the odd scan abnormality, the walk takes fifteen minutes and twenty seconds.

"Parole day, huh?" says the nearest min-sec inmate—a Tony Stark.

"November," says Carter. "Doctor Day."

At cell seven, they stop. Victoria holds up her portable and scans the inmate, who is watching a vid. The order scrolls through the screen of her portable, and she starts to read it aloud. "Doctor HF109, you are guilty of unauthorized tuning, catastrophic timeline alteration, and evading charges fairly laid on you by a non-Network timestream authority. These charges and your culpability are not in question. By Network law, you were sentenced to six centuries of incarceration. The Local Standard date is November the eighth, twenty-nine-forty-four. You have been incarcerated for exactly two hundred and twenty-five years. You may now elect to be cryogenically suspended or totally erased, if you so choose. With the approval of the Head Proctor and the facility's Senior Warder, you may also elect to continue your minimum-security confinement for the remainder of your sentence. Should you elect to be erased, you are entitled to a speedy and humane execution unless you prefer otherwise, in which case you may dictate the manner of your death."

The man in the cell turns and blinks at her as though only just noticing their presence. "Sorry, what?" he says blithely. "That was my favourite bit—I was rather engrossed."

Frowning, Victoria repeats the parole announcement.

"Thanks very much," he says. "I think I'll continue my slow death by overdose of jelly babies and old movies. Never know, I might still come in handy someday."

"Your preference has been logged. Barring emergency, you will be eligible for parole again in another twenty-five years Local."

They go through three more Doctors, one carefully covering the walls of his cell with circles and spirals. There are a total of five in min-sec—each one simultaneously the gravest threat to timestream stability and one of the Network's greatest assets.

"Does anyone else think it tastes like January?" asks the last of the min-sec Doctors as they approach his cell. "Just me?"

Victoria doesn't even have to look at the orders for this one. "John Smith NC022-Sigma. You are guilty of instigating the creation of a timestream-spanning organization, unauthorized tuning, catastrophic timeline alteration, and introducing pre-folding societies to advanced time theory. These charges and your culpability are not in question. By the laws you yourself wrote, sir, you were sentenced to lifelong incarceration."

The Founder smiles at her, looking for all the world like a little boy watching his favorite vid.

"The Local Standard date is November the eighth, twenty-nine-forty-four. You have been incarcerated for exactly eight hundred and fifty-five years—the entire duration of this facility's operation. You may now elect—"

"No, thank you," he says sweetly.

Victoria stops. He's never interrupted before. She's visited him over a hundred times now, and he's always let her finish. He's the one who _wrote_ the law that states all these orders have to be read to the subject being charged.

"Are you feeling all right, sir?" Leonard asks.

"I'm waiving my right to have my parole orders read to me," says the Founder. "There's a provision for that."

There is. No one ever exercises it, but it's there.

"I'm going to continue serving my sentence in minimum security—I have to. You can't freeze me, because you might need me on short notice. Can't erase me, again because you might need me. Because how many subjects are there, do you think, who've seen _all_ of Time? Who understand the way universes are separated and linked? Who can _feel_ the threads of causality? Not even the fellows in the Fridge, or the ones down the way. Because I made the harder choice."

"What's that, sir?"

"I risked an entire universe to give Time her own set of hands," he replies cheerfully. "It's paid off, obviously…the Network is flourishing. But we wouldn't want anyone to think it's an endeavour worth repeating, so here I am."

Victoria looks at her portable, just to keep from having to look into those young-old eyes any longer. She presses a button. "Your preference has been logged. Barring emergency, you will be eligible for parole again in another twenty-five years Local."

He smiles at her. "You know, I could waive all future parole hearings. But then I'd have to be psychologically evaluated every ten years instead, and while it would be nice to have more frequent visitors, psychological evaluation is an exhausting process, and I should hate to make more work for Len."

Victoria swallows. "Are you _sure_ you're feeling all right, sir?"

"Thanks, yes."

"Is there anything you'd like, sir? Books, vids, clothes?" She thinks for a moment. "Snacks?"

"Thanks, no," he says. "I'm set for snacks—Mister Carter's girl does an absolutely brilliant jammy dodger."

Slightly bewildered, Victoria proceeds to the end of the corridor. Past the guards, past the next null-lock, scanned into the control room.

"Parole order oh-three-two," she says, pressing her hand to a scanner on the central control panel.

In the cryo-room, eight towers light up.

"Thaw orders queued," says the warder on duty. "Control synched to your portable."

Victoria and Leonard enter the nearest holding pen.

"I'm sure he's just tired," Leonard tells her.

"Wouldn't you be?" she blurts out before she can stop herself.

Two thousand years old, burdened with the knowledge of times and spaces, haunted by the choice to kill his people or let them kill themselves…

But the Founder has never acted like this, not in all the time she's been Head Warder. It bothers her, because if there is one inviolate thing in her narrow view of the universes, it is that the Founder is a good man—the very best—and a pillar of their entire way of life. If he falls, what does that bode for the rest of them?

Leonard lifts his chin. "He's long since made peace with it," he tells her. "He found the optimum stability, took the risk, and won. And when most people would be insensate with grief or guilt, he calmly sat down and wrote an incredibly comprehensive legal system."

"Most people wouldn't subsequently try and sentence themselves," she points out, and presses the button. A tank is slotted into the gate of the holding pen, and the thaw starts.

"He's not most people."

She frowns. "No…he's not."

And she starts to read the parole announcement of the first of eight cold-storage Doctors.

**.End.**


	14. Being the Bad Guy

so i accidentally wrote Jim Moriarty into the Fateverse.

if you haven't watched any of Sherlock (the BBC show), all you need to know is that it's the Sherlock Holmes stories set in modern-day London instead of Victorian London, and Jim Moriarty is as crafty as Doyle's version while also being completely off his damn rocker.

so, here's a version of him that works as a field agent for the Network, as seen through the eyes of his Proctor, the Core's native version of Karla (Moonstone).

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. BBC Sherlock crossover. crazy people. language: g.

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** NO 3652.

**disclaimer:** marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

**notes:** 1) MerianMoriarty has actually written up a pretty extensive treatise about the FSED and all its associated ethical profile descriptors. i'm thinking of asking her to post it somewhere, even if it's only interesting to people like me. 2) that is indeed the etymology of the word Tuesday, though there's evidence that the word was brought to the north (and to the British Isles) in the medieval period, with some other meaning originally attached. 3) certain varieties of sociopath (particularly narcissists and megalomaniacs) disregard societal rules and norms because they consider themselves above them. 4) in the NC bundle, the Network grew a new Moriarty after Reichenbach. 5) in the original tumblr version of the fic, Karla didn't mention the way that morality-based rules affect the mental states of the employees (and that's the actual reason that they have them; remember that the Savant talked about the fact that morals and ethics, although artificial constructs of sentient beings rather than native phenomena of the timestream, greatly affect the timestream's stability), and i don't think Moriarty would've been satisfied without that further explanation.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (lex-munro. livejournal 64465. html) for terms and concepts, and The Fateverse Appendix (lex-munro. livejournal 64565. html) for Nodes, branches, and important people.

* * *

><p><strong>Being the Bad Guy<strong>

Proctor 882 is a very practical woman. Most would say brutally so.

It's in her ethical profile. High-functioning sociopath. No empathy response. No hesitation response. No guilt response.

Her subtype is 'independent scientist.' Decisive, assertive. No test-anxiety response. No Samaritan response. An inclination to catalog, to observe, to analyze.

The emotions she feels are dull, limited in spectrum, and far divorced from her actions. She's a well-versed liar and a decent actress—she can put on a convincing show, but she doesn't actually experience things like grief and love.

Instead of feelings, she has facts, problems, more facts, and solutions.

It lets her deal with patients the average person would find morally repugnant.

It's a Tuesday. Tiw's Day. Tiw. Tiwaz. Tyr. Norse god of victory.

Her Tuesday oh-seven-hundred is sitting in her office. She doesn't normally see patients until nine. She never knows how he gets in; she doesn't ask and he doesn't volunteer the information.

"Good morning, Dr. Sofen. Ask me the question—go on, go ahead."

She sits across from him and pretends to make a note on her portable.

He grins. "You know you want to."

"We both know that's not true, Jim. I don't want or _not_ want to ask it."

He widens his eyes. "Ooh, you know how you turn me on when you get ambivalent."

"Apathetic, actually. Ambivalence is inclusive, and would imply that I both do _and_ don't want to ask. Ambivalence is more in keeping with a less passive profile."

"And psychobabble, _unf_."

She raises an eyebrow and makes another imaginary note. "You're urging me to ask because you want to answer. Have you been rehearsing, Jim?"

Slowly, his eyes roll, and he laughs. "You caught me, Doc! That's me pegged, then. I'm sure there's a note somewhere in my file that just says NARCISSISM in great big letters." He drags his finger through the air as if to trace text. "See also: compulsive need for the admiration of others. Perfectly justifiable, in my case, but them's the breaks."

She makes no comment. In point of fact, his file says MEGALOMANIA in great big letters (with a footnote of _unsuitable for long-term Node custody_). The distinction is that he doesn't particularly care whether people love him, as long as they acknowledge that they're powerless by comparison.

"Let's face facts, Dr. Sofen—you know that _I_ know that you know that I need to be or seem to be superior to everyone around me." He shrugs with faked sheepishness. "It's a character flaw."

Now that he's admitted it aloud, she folds her hands together. "All right. How do you feel about your work with the Fidelis Timestream Maintenance Network?"

"I find it challenging and fulfilling, and yet curiously unconfining."

"Unconfining. An interesting word. Not 'liberating' or 'relaxed.'"

He smiles faintly, insincerely. "Dr. Sofen, we both know I'm not exactly 'at liberty,' and the job itself tends to take place at breakneck speeds with the utmost precision and quite a lot of rules, so I would hardly call it 'relaxed' in any connotation."

"Then why 'unconfining'? With all those rules, after all."

"Because they aren't stupid little rules built up for politeness' sake. Outside the island, it's a _whole 'nother world_," he says in what is possibly meant to be a comical imitation of what North America calls a 'southern' accent. "Out there, it's, '_ooh, don't kill people, that's not nice_.' In here it's, '_don't kill that one there just yet, we still need him to hold up the timestream's trousers_.'"

"It bothers you that societal norms are so arbitrary and yet others have the temerity to think they apply to you."

"I'm the only one allowed to have arbitrary whims," he says. "Part of being the 'bad guy'—it's a really cool deal, actually. Y'know, I came to the Dark Side for the biscuits, but the arbitrary whims are my favourite fringe benefit."

"And acting within this less arbitrary set of rules is fulfilling to you?"

"I don't get bored as often anymore; that's close enough. So the job is…satisfying. Yeah, I like that one…satisfying. Things are getting done, I'm less bored, and I'm not outright offended by the rules of the game."

She actually does make a note about that. _As suspected, affinity for the term 'rules' is an extension of a game metaphor._ "And how would you rate your most recent opponents?"

"Much the same batch as always. Somewhat clever, rarely brilliant, but quite dogged. And, on occasion, they do manage to surprise." He grins. "Keeps me on my toes."

"How would you compare them to your opponents prior to your near-erasure?"

As expected, he finally displays true emotional markers. They pass in a blur on his face and on the screen of her portable. Pulse jump. Pupillary flutter. Micro-expressions for contempt, regret, amusement, sorrow, excitement. He leans forward in his chair (usually _her_ chair, but he seems to think there's some significance to switching their positions, as if that might alter their respective roles) and stares at her.

She stares back.

"Do you know, Dr. Sofen," he drawls with deceptive sweetness, "that I could kill you in just five seconds?"

She smiles, because death is a small matter. A little thing. Death is nothing like erasure, the knowledge that everything you ever were and ever will be stops _here_. Death is a flicker on the vid-screen of the timestream, easily mended by minor adjustments.

"Or I could kill you over five days," he goes on, eyes shining. "I could make it last, draw it out, take you apart bit by bit to see what you really are, behind your eyes, on the _inside_, where nobody else can see…"

She makes a note. _Still refuses to discuss Holmes. Reacts with intimidation displays._ "Still a sore subject, then. All right, what about the experience of near-erasure itself? Tunnels, bright lights, angelic voices?"

He grimaces. "Don't," he says. "Don't poke fun, that's just…"

"Rude?"

"Boring."

She smiles again. Being boring. A cardinal sin in the gospel according to James Moriarty.

"'_Oh, was there a bright light?_'" he says in a mocking falsetto. "'_Everyone always says there's a bright light._' An endless loop of the same tired questions."

"Yet there was, in fact, a bright light."

"Because that's what happens when brand new eyes open. It could be fifteen watts and still look like the sun." He makes a languid gesture with one hand, almost dismissive. "Y'know, they tell me my reconstruction was expensive. Isn't that curious, when the Network operates essentially as a moneyless society? What is the definition of 'expensive' to a nation that can create whatever they want quite literally out of air?"

"I'm not an economist, Jim."

He braces his forearms against his knees and grins up at her. "Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Maybe there isn't any such thing as 'expensive,' and it's their way of imposing _arbitrary_ order onto the people they take from the outside world." Again, he shows contempt, this time with a little anger.

"Perhaps it isn't arbitrary."

"Then why not just tell me the real reasons, hm? Why not tell _everyone_?" He tips his head to the side. "Ah, but I'm sure you know the answer to that. That's your _job_, isn't it, Dr. Sofen? Knowing exactly how people will react to certain words, certain knowledge. And I know the power of making people _think_ there are costs to things."

"Expensive," she enunciates carefully. "Think about what it means, free of context. The most general definition."

"High in cost. Which can mean…either it requires significant resources to bring about, or it incurs heavy consequences." He smiles suddenly. "Oh, that's clever. I see."

Now he thinks he's privy to some great secret (it's not really a secret, but most people don't stop to think about it). Narcissism appeased.

"Every single line of Network Law was given to us by the Founder," she tells him. "There are scientific reasons behind the bulk of our restrictions, and moral reasons behind the rest. Nothing so…galling…as the laws of most societies, I assure you—just little rules to make sure Network Law is applied equally to everyone, and to make sure that any corruption introduced to the system can be swiftly and thoroughly weeded out. Little things. The way our leaders are chosen and the way our prisoners are treated. But even those have scientific backing in the medical and psychological fields, and almost anything can be excused with the right provisions."

He leans back and winks. "Every legal system has loopholes. I find the biggest is usually the people doing the enforcing."

She watches him for a moment. "Is there anything else you'd like to talk about this week, Jim?"

"You've given me quite a lot to think on. We'll have a great deal to discuss next time—for now, I'm off to take over someone's world."

"Good luck, then."

He leaves.

She makes another note.

_Current status: stable, still interested. Ready for deployment against various designations of Sherlock Holmes._

**.End.**


End file.
